Читать книгу Short Candles - Rita Donovan - Страница 6

If she is wearing the shoes with the straps, do not look for the perfect punch hole her father has added with his awl. It is there, but hidden beneath the twisted posy of yellow trefoil and purple cow vetch with which she decorates her shoes.

Little Sue Cardinal, who will carry “little” until she is older, like Little Stevie Wonder, the blind singer she does not know, takes the route by the river nearly every day. It is the 1960s, and her parents are not worried about abduction, or drowning, or evil people who would take a child from a pathway and destroy it. Her parents are worried about other things: her father Robert, his health, which has magically declined, as if someone has a curse on him; and her mother Adele, her job working in an office on the other side of town.

Besides, everyone knows that Fire Engine Sue can take care of herself. Look at how confidently she skips along the trail, as if she has memorized every rock, every grassy clump of earth. She has been referred to as Fire Engine Sue since she was four years old and awoke to warn her family of a fire that was just beginning to lick up the yellow curtains in the kitchen. There was significant damage to their well-appointed house, but the family was safe, and everyone agreed that it could have been much, much worse. The baby, Carla, was in her crib, and everyone knew how smoke affected babies. It was Suzanne, Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, who had saved them.

This is the beginning of it then. For it is one thing to wake up to the smell of smoke, to be a light sleeper, perhaps, or slightly weak of bladder. It is another to be able to tell the future. At four, the future is just about everything, her father argues at night with his wife. Why do people come to her with their problems? For Suzanne is what every community wants, an amulet against chaos.

Nothing is supposed to break through the line of box elders and maples at the edge of town. Why do you think those rows of peonies and the tall cosmos are along the driveways? And now they have Fire Engine Sue to keep them one step ahead of calamity, the law, the cancer creeping up the spine.

The town prides itself on those lines of trees along the perimeter. It had been a group endeavour some twenty years earlier, when people came back from the war. Suzanne’s father had come back then too, almost as young as when he’d left, but not as fresh. No. He was nineteen when he returned, having joined up with parental permission. Too young to drink or vote when he had enlisted, he had nonetheless managed to maneuver his tank across parts of Holland, to the relief of the thin and ragged Dutch. Or so he said.

He doesn’t talk much about the war any more. It is tucked into the headband of his fedora like a feather. And who is wearing hats these days?

Suzanne stops skipping, for there is a bullfrog speaking to her from the edge of the river. The bank is low here, so she goes over and waits politely for him to complete his original composition before continuing on. She should do something today. She wants to build a shelter in the woods for lost penguins, but she is unsure of the dimensions of such a structure. She will go to the library. They have everything there, books about people’s throats, a story about a wagon train that stretches far back into the picture on the cover. They will know about penguins as well.

“Hello, Little Sue!”

Mrs. Reidel. She is hanging out the same tablecloth again. The berry stain has not come out, despite the expensive powder she bought at Laturelle’s store. It has faded, though, into a light and pleasing pink that reminds Suzanne of the cheeks of her doll, Annabelle.

“Hello!” she waves back. “The bullfrog talked again.”

“Good,” Mrs. Reidel says, shaking a pale green dishtowel out of the basket. “Could you hand me some pins?”

Suzanne is over the fence in a flash and pointing wooden clothespins at Mrs. Reidel.

“They look like crocodiles.”

“Hmmm?”

The pins are in Mrs. Reidel’s mouth, four crocodiles ready to snap.

“Do you know about penguin houses?”

What people cannot understand, then, what has them really puzzled, is the cruelty of the gift. Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, successfully predicted Mr. Gaumper’s broken leg, on ice in front of Laturelle’s store. She was able to warn Bobby Allerton away from three possible allergic reactions, one deadly. She told people to cover their plants, and Mrs. Reidel was one of the few who listened, and therefore did not lose her crop of tomatoes and beets to the freak hailstorm only four weeks earlier.

So what people have trouble understanding is how such a gift could not have prevented tiny Carla from falling to her death. Really, this sentiment almost overtook the general dismay at the funeral two years ago. Here was a baby who had survived a house fire, a toddler who followed her sister Suzanne around like a trusty St. Bernard. Suzanne knew this child better, surely, than she knew Mr. Gaumper’s leg or Bobby Allerton’s allergies, and yet the toddler was found beneath the second floor balcony, her small precise bones shaken and jittered back into place.

Robert Cardinal blamed himself. Hadn’t he been told to watch the tot that afternoon? Adele Cardinal blamed him as well. Suzanne? She said Carla was flying to Jesus and had left her body, with the scabbed knee, behind.

“Jesus might not like scabs.”

People kept away from Little Sue for a while after that. Perhaps the town didn’t have its own Fire Engine after all. Maybe it was a fluke. After all, it was inevitable that somebody would break a leg outside Laturelle’s store; the guy never salted or sanded.

Over time, a few people came back. Suzanne never refused to speak with anyone. And if they brought along a sucker or a bag of caramels, well, so much the better. Most people, though, just thought of her as the strange little kid who had lost her sister, an unfortunate blip in the timeline of the town.

“Hello Mrs. Craig,” Suzanne says as she bounces past the desk.

“Ssshhh.” The hand points to the SILENCE sign, as it always does when Suzanne arrives at the library. Mrs. Craig sighs. It isn’t the child’s fault. She’s a wildflower, that one. Where are her parents? Why doesn’t anyone take the child in hand?

Suzanne studies the grass stain on her knee before diving into the stacks of books. It is a nice pattern, like sun on a field of green. Sprinkled. Blurry.

“No scabs, Carla,” she whispers to her knee.

The first time they took Suzanne to the optometrist, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with her eyes.” She had correctly identified not only the letters on the chart that Dr. Marsh had pulled down over his bookshelf, but the letters on the books behind it as well.

“Could you . . .” he pulled out a bottle of pills and had her read the fine print. “Just spell it if you can’t say the words.”

And Suzanne read the dosage and side effects for Dr. Marsh.

“Thank you. Damn little labels.”

Adele Cardinal had taken the morning off work for this and stood facing Dr. Marsh, holding her daughter’s head between her hands as if to steady it.

“But she says she sees blurs.”

He put his hand under Suzanne’s chin and lifted. They were arguing over her head.

“You don’t see anything blurry, do you, Little Sue?”

“Only when things are blurry.”

“There you are,” Dr. Marsh smiled.

Adele Cardinal couldn’t believe it. Maybe she was going crazy.

Her life has not gone well these last years. Oh, no. How does one survive the death of a child, a perfect child who caused no trouble or worry, a child who brought only happiness, and no confusion, to the home? It was such a comfort to see her in her pink flared coat and bonnet, a new garment, not a hand-me-down from Suzanne. The child had dark curls and an open expression devoid of the quizzical squint of her older sister. She was a joy, and that joy had found a way to turn the latch on the balcony door, toddle out past the wicker chair and petunias, and fling itself away. Joy. Gone. The door bumping open and shut.

It is not the same between her and Robert any more. How could it be? He is constantly distracted. Robert writes in his “must-do” ledger, yet the more he plans, the less he does.

He will wash the car.

But the car stands there in the driveway, a permanent taupe colour, the grime thick with loss and Suzanne’s printed “Hello.”

And so. What is there for Adele but the offices of Honoré & Stevens? What else except typing up wills and property settlements, the who-gets-what of deaths and divorces? You are miserable? You are in despair? Here, you may have a duplex.

Absurd, she tells herself in triplicate, as she carries the papers in to be signed.

Supper. Suzanne is putting raisin climbers on the side of the mountain of mashed potatoes. A trail of brown sugar and ketchup is edging down the other side.

“Look out, look out! What is it called again?”

Suzanne’s father looks over with his absent eyes. “Lava,” he whispers.

“Lava,” Suzanne nods, as the raisins unknowingly head toward doom.

This cannot go on. Adele has been resisting the offer to send Suzanne to Sophie’s. The child likes her Aunt Sophie well enough, but Adele is not convinced her sister truly understands what it is like caring for Fire Engine Sue.

“Just the summer. What can it do? I’m alone here since Vince is gone. I have the time. Send her to me. You and Robert can have some time of your own together.”

Adele bites her lip.

Then she thinks of Suzanne, wandering the town by herself all day, probably bored to tears.

“Yes, yes, okay. Next Saturday.” She hangs up but keeps the phone in her lap, and gently pets it, like a cat.

“This is too small,” Adele admonishes, throwing a pair of pedal-pushers and a pop-top onto the floor. “And this?” She holds it before Suzanne’s slender body. “Yes. Finished.”

The child watches as the pile grows at her feet.

“When did this happen?” her mother demands, as if it is spilled sugar that is drawing ants.

“I don’t know,” the child replies. She looks down at her legs then holds out her arms. “Do you think it’s perm-mament?”

Adele is forced to drag Suzanne down to the only dry goods store in town, where summer outfits hang on pegboards in the window. One Sunday dress, green. Three sets of shorts and tops. Suzanne points to the pink set with puppies on it.

“Linda has that. And Cassie. I’ll look like twins,” the child says.

Back at home, the small suitcase with the cloth-embroidered flowers is filling up. A bathing suit is thrown in. Who knows if it fits? It is when she sees her lamb go in, her battered lamb that survived the fire and her sister’s pulling, that she starts to cry.

“Oh, what now? It will be fun for you. Aunt Sophie has time to take you to the zoo, and the park. She’ll even read to you.”

Suzanne curls up in her mother’s arms, and Adele holds her while trying to take the tangled elastic out of her hair.

“If I go, Mrs. Reidel will die,” Suzanne whispers to her mother’s thighs.

She must warn Mrs. Reidel to be very, very careful while she is away. She doesn’t want to scare her, but she must tell her all the same. Suzanne throws on her new dress, slips out on Saturday morning, and runs, runs, runs along the path by the house. Nobody is outside. The trucks are quiet. The dogs and birds are awake, but she notices the peacefulness of the morning and slows her pace a moment. The trees overhead make a green ceiling, but if you look up, you can see the sun behind them. And then—quick—she runs until she sees the pale yellow house. The tomatoes are well. The beet greens wave at her like always.

She knocks at the screen door.

Mrs. Reidel likes to get up early, but not this early. Suzanne listens. No toaster popping, no coffee percolating, no cat whining for his breakfast. Too early. She will be in trouble again. She runs around the side of the house. Mrs. Reidel’s big hollyhocks are in the way. Suzanne looks around. There, on the ground, the small flat ladder the old woman walks across on muddy days to get to her toolshed.

Suzanne bends and lifts one end. Too heavy. She pulls with all her might and drags it across the yard, over to the hollyhocks.

“Sorry, flowers,” she says. She is a little afraid of the hollyhocks. They loom. No time to worry now, though, and she tips the ladder up against the side of the house. She climbs, feeling the flowers scratching her legs. She is in the hollyhocks. Suzanne puts her hands on the window frame and peers in. The filmy white curtains make everything hazy, but she can make out the dresser and the bed over to the right. Mrs. Reidel is definitely in the bed, her large body covered in pale blue. Suzanne wonders if the tea stain is still on the coverlet. The window is open a crack to let in air. To let in only small insects. Suzanne can fit her fingers under it, so she does then yanks up. The force nearly topples her from the ladder.

More space. For bigger insects. Or, if she just . . . ouch! . . . now. Yes. Big enough for her. Suzanne climbs up on the sill and slips her legs in. The drop to the floor is not great, and she plops down almost silently. Ferg the cat looks up from the bed and starts to scowl, but seeing who it is, turns away contentedly.

“Hi Ferg,” Suzanne says quietly. She tiptoes over to the bed. Of course, Mrs. Reidel is asleep. It is early Saturday morning. If Suzanne wakes her, she will be in trouble.

“Mrs. Reidel,” she shakes gently. “Mrs . . . Mrs. Reidel.” Her voice gets stronger as the woman does not move or mutter. The cat has sprung to the floor in the commotion and now adds his voice to the chorus.

Suzanne saw something once on television, so she goes to the bathroom and gets the small lipstick-stained cup from its stand above the sink, and fills it with water. Back at the bedside, she crosses the fingers of her free hand and throws the water into Mrs. Reidel’s face.

Nothing.

The cat is meowing. Suzanne runs down the hall to the telephone table. She remembers the numbers and watches the dial spinning slowly, too slowly, around each time.

Three rings. Four. And on the fifth ring, her father’s voice.

“Come! Help!” she says, her eyes on the hallway.

The ambulance arrives with Suzanne’s parents. Her father looks funny in his casual trousers and pyjama top. Her mother has her hair in curlers beneath a printed scarf. She pulls Suzanne to her in a gesture that is somewhere between fear and anger. The stretcher is sliding down the hall now. Suzanne closes her eyes.

“Is it?” her mother asks. “Is she?”

The ambulance attendant looks up. “Where’s the girl?”

She is hiding behind her mother.

“Fire Engine Sue, you came just in time. Diabetic coma,” he adds, nodding to Mrs. Cardinal.

Suzanne rides home in the car. They have not told her. Does this mean Mrs. Reidel will live? They have not said anything about how she crept out of her home and crawled into the window of Mrs. Reidel’s house. They have not scolded her for the rip in her brand new, green Sunday dress that she is wearing on Saturday to go to the city. Suzanne flicks open the miniature metal ashtray in the back seat armrest and studies the ledge, where a cigarette gets to sit and watch the world of ash below.

Aunt Sophie’s house is in a residential section of the city, but buses at the end of the street can take them anywhere they want to go. The library, which is a giant grown-up version of Mrs. Craig’s library back home, has more children’s books than Suzanne has ever seen before. How can a child read so many books? And there is the ice cream parlour with dozens of flavours, and the spruce doggie on the corner, a sad-looking terrier who seems to live beneath the spruce tree. Aunt Sophie tells Suzanne that she has never seen the dog anywhere but under that tree.

“It’s his tree house,” Suzanne replies.

Sophie Marsala has been widowed almost a year. Vince was her second husband, and both husbands succumbed to heart attacks.

“Maybe it’s Sophie’s cooking,” Suzanne’s father joked at the table soon after Vince died.

Suzanne’s eyes widen as she remembers this. Aunt Sophie is passing her a plate of spaghetti. She is hungry. Didn’t her stomach rumble all the way home on the bus? The meatballs are small and perfectly round. The sauce looks okay. What about that sprinkle of cheese? Suzanne knows how Alice felt wondering which drink she wasn’t supposed to eat or drink. But this isn’t Wonderland, and Suzanne says a little prayer to Jesus to save her from poison meatballs then digs in.

Nothing.

Tasty.

Suzanne smiles at her aunt, now cutting poison bread and pouring poison milk. There. They click glasses, Suzanne’s milk spills onto her spaghetti, and they both laugh.

Unlike Suzanne’s mother’s hair, Aunt Sophie’s is long and wound up in a bun. There is grey hair and black hair mixed together. Suzanne likes how the hair moves like a wave when she undoes it.

Aunt Sophie combs out Suzanne’s tangles, too, and they sit side by side, looking into the mirror.

“Tell me, Little Sue, what does the future hold for your old aunt?”

She is only a little bit joking, for she has stopped combing and is staring right at her reflection.

But of course, this is not how it goes. Suzanne can no more say what will become of Aunt Sophie than she can say what will become of Suzanne.

“Did you know . . . did you know about Uncle Vince?”

There is a look on Aunt Sophie’s face. She holds the comb strangely. Suzanne closes her eyes for a moment and shivers. When she opens them, Aunt Sophie is dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

Adele calls to see how they are getting on. Suzanne tells her mother that Aunt Sophie is the cheerfullest person she knows. Then Adele talks to Sophie. Suzanne cannot understand the half-conversation, so she goes out back to see the worms. Even though this is the city, there are piles of earth here and there in the yard. There is one pile that Aunt Sophie says used to belong to a tree. The tree was removed, but the earth stayed, and now Suzanne can visit the worms there.

“Worthworms,” she says at supper that evening.

Aunt Sophie looks up from her plate. “You mean earthworms?”

“Worthworms. They’re really hard workers. They’re worth a lot.”

Aunt Sophie wants to give Suzanne a kitten. “Something to love,” she explains to Adele. Something to keep her busy? Better a dog, then, to romp with through the woods. A cat will sit and stare and not allow itself to be played with by a schoolgirl who speaks to bullfrogs. It will not be a pet.

“You know, a pet!” Sophie pleads.

But where is Little Sue? Why is she not begging and carrying on as children are supposed to when the issue of small animals is raised? Why is it Sophie who whimpers and grovels?

Little Sue is in Aunt Sophie’s backyard talking to the worms.

“Really, Adele, a cat or a dog. Right away.”

Soon, however, the summer is over. The cool evening breezes of August brush the tiny hairs on Suzanne’s arms and tell her soon. Soon. Snow.

It is so cold one evening that Aunt Sophie lights a fire in the fireplace. Suzanne breathes deep. Burning wood. Clean wood, not like the smell of her house when it was in flames. Soon she will leave and return to town for school. She will be in Grade Two. She will find her tunic and slip it over her head. Will it fit? She holds out her arms. She can never see herself growing, but they tell her she is.

She must see Charlie Donaldson. She must tell him about the train bridge.

“Mommy?” The phone is heavy.

Suzanne hears the sigh in her mother’s voice. “What is it? You have two days left with your aunt.”

“Mommy? Could you tell Charlie Donaldson not to go on the train bridge? He likes to go on the train bridge with his brother, and he can’t, okay?”

This is not what parents should have to put up with. Adele has her monthly pains and has already flown off the handle at work today. She does not need this kind of nonsense. So she reassures the child, hangs up the phone and goes to lie down on the couch.

Suzanne does a jigsaw puzzle with Aunt Sophie. A clown in a little racing car, with a monkey balancing on his head.

“I have the monkey’s wave!” Suzanne cries.

While on a trestle, in the setting sun, Charlie Donaldson dies.

Time passes, blue trickles in the stream. Except that when Suzanne holds the water in her hand, it is clear. She wonders about water, how far it travels, not only downstream but up into the air and down again. They are learning that in school. It never disappears, not really; it just becomes something else.

Mrs. Reidel is in a wheelchair, and her flowers are dusty. Suzanne has given up pulling weeds and spends the afternoons practicing her reading with Mrs. Reidel. The woman seems so much older, although it has only been months since the summer. She likes to hear Little Sue read, or so she says. They both like The Snow Queen. Mrs. Reidel says she knew someone once whose heart was frozen like Kay’s was in the story.

“Did the boy have a Gerda?” A little girl to search for him, to find him and melt his frozen heart?

Mrs. Reidel smiles from her wheelchair, Ferg curled up in her lap. “Yes. Yes, there was a girl.”

A whole term goes by, then a blurry Christmas, and soon there is an Easter Egg Hunt in Mrs. Reidel’s garden, but all Suzanne finds are clothespins and poo from the dog next door. Mrs. Reidel presents her with a chocolate bunny, the largest Suzanne has seen. They keep it at Mrs. Reidel’s house and eat from it after school, even though Mrs. Reidel’s doctor says she can’t. When they are down to the toes—hooves? pads?—of the bunny, school is ready to end again. It is the beginning of something that will be called “The Summer of Love”. Suzanne does not listen to the radio and doesn’t hear about the young people, their clothes, the crazy music. She is down by the river.

“I love the summer,” she tells the bullfrog. “Of course, you do, too.”

Her parents are busy. Her father is taking care of his health by running around. He puts on his baggy shorts and a T-shirt, and he runs around in the basement. He doesn’t want to go outside yet, he says, because of his form. Suzanne looks at her father. He is formed like her father, long skinny legs coming out of the enormous leg holes of his shorts, long torso and his turtle head on top. He runs around until he gets tired, then he flops down on the old sofa with the sticking-out spring at the end. He lies there for a while before getting up and running around again.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to stay alive,” he gasps.

And runs in the basement like the well pump.

It is sometimes strange to believe that it could really be true, that Little Sue could really be Fire Engine Sue, a girl with a gift. This child cannot even make her bed properly. She is a bright but indifferent student. How can she possess the abilities they claim?

For they do come to her. Mrs. Reidel sends for her, but they are old friends. Yet some still trek up the Cardinals’ driveway, on the flimsy excuse of borrowing flour, toting a small gift for Suzanne.

“I want to buy the coffee shop. Should I go ahead and do it?”

“Is Michael Cormack the right man for me?”

“Will I ever quit smoking?”

It doesn’t matter how many times Adele or Suzanne tell them, they return, sheepishly, to the front door, always embarrassed, always with questions.

If the child had any powers, wouldn’t she tell Adele? Couldn’t Adele benefit from knowing, just a little in advance, the many trials she must endure? In the newspapers, they are speaking about new consciousness, about opening up your mind. Could this be what they mean? Has Suzanne become like the hippies out on the city streets, running off to India and ingesting things that cause them to have visions? Taking LSD and trying to fly off the edges of buildings, only to fall . . .

Truth be told, Adele is afraid of the young people on the street. They unnerve her with their colourful long skirts, their wild peasant blouses and bouncing breasts, their hair that looks like birds have nested in it. They kiss in public, with tongues. They sing when they feel like it. And they seem to hate Adele, who dresses in pastel pantsuits that are neat, unwrinkled and clean.

Suzanne is but a child. She has no part in this “new consciousness”. And Adele aims to see that it stays that way.

“No more make-believe. No more pretend. No more talking to animals.”

“You talk to Fidel,” Suzanne says.

The dog out front of Cormier’s bakery.

“No waiting for them to talk back,” her mother says.

It is hard to imagine a world of such silence. Suzanne hears thunder in her ears as she walks the river path. No voices, no sounds addressing her. She is mute in a loud and undifferentiated world in which dolls are dolls and worms are wordless.

How can people live in such loneliness?

“I’m telling you, Suzanne, go out and find a friend. Make friends with Jeremy.”

The boy down the road. Jeremy is eight, but already he has mastered how to burn insects with his brother’s magnifying glass. Already he chops worms into bits with his penknife. He plays marbles to win. He cheats at checkers. She will not go there.

“You don’t want to become a hermit, do you?”

A hermit crab walking sideways across the carpet of the sea bottom, snapping his claws? Or a hermit like the one Father Jacques told her about once, who lived with the bugs and insects and talked to air.

“I’m worried about her,” Adele tells Robert as they sit at the kitchen table. Little Sue has padded downstairs and is listening by the door. She can peek through the doorjamb.

Robert shrugs and runs his fingers through his turtle hair. “I’ve tried to talk to you about having another one . . .”

But Adele will hear none of it. There is no way she will entrust another of her children to this family of careless people. It was carelessness that took Carla from her mother’s arms.

“My carelessness!” Suzanne hears her father’s anguished voice.

“Yes! You and that child, who was supposed to be a big sister, who goes about warning and saving other people but . . .”

She chokes off the rest. There it is, then. Fire Engine Sue. Fire Engine Sue and Adele’s useless husband, the reasons Carla died.

Adele and Robert have been to this place before and somehow always manage to pull themselves back, with half-hearted promises and grief. They even apologize once in a while and resolve not to let their daughter’s name enter into their problems. But tonight Suzanne hears none of the making up, for she has crept back to her room to lie beneath the rumpled bedspread. The moon is lighting part of her wall, on the side of the room where Carla would have slept.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the night, wet tears sliding down into her ears.

She is old enough to know that the girl who owns the nail polish is in charge. Joanne Albert has her sister’s leftover bottles of nail polish and scabbed tubes of lipstick. Once a week, the entrepreneur gathers the makeup into a basket and comes around looking for shoppers. She says she is the Avon lady, but she looks nothing like the heavily made-up woman with the wig who brings Suzanne’s mother samples. Joanne is supplier to kids like Suzanne who have developed a sudden interest in these pots and tubes. Often they will meet at the big tree in the park, three or four girls with cuts on their shins, stains on their knees. When Joanne has her juvenile coven primed, she opens, slowly, the first bottle of nail polish.

“Blushing Rose,” she intones, to the girls’ collective intake of breath. “It is fresh and dis-cree.”

Suzanne almost proffers a nail of her own then holds back, remembering the other bottles in the basket.

Joanne sweeps a bottle through the air. “Torrid Tango . . . for those hot, hot nights.”

Suzanne cannot possibly imagine how one red fingernail is going to provide relief from the sweaty summer evenings. The polish has obscured her cuticle and is only slightly covering the hangnail she’s been chewing.

“Beautiful,” she says quietly, but Joanne hears it.

“Forty cents for the rest of the bottle.”

Suzanne doesn’t have forty cents. She has only twenty-six cents: two dimes and six pennies, and one of those pennies is a flat railroad penny. Besides, Suzanne cannot trade away her entire holdings for one item, no matter how wonderful. So she shakes her head and gets up from under the tree. She can hear Joanne going on about a small and stinky bottle of perfume, but she is leaving. She has fended off the need and is happy with her red fingernail, the pointer of her left hand, pointing her home.

“I am entirely in love,” she murmurs, lying on her stomach on the big rock by the river, crossing her eyes and staring at the scarlet glow of her finger. Water moves over the stones, and the afternoon disappears downriver.

It doesn’t happen for a long time after that. Suzanne is immersed in school, in her classes that go on all day long, with Mrs. Naylor walking up and down the aisles, a ruler in her hand. Slap, slap, the ruler says, as she moves past every desk. And on one of these passes Suzanne feels it, the slight push like someone’s hand has found her lower back and is nudging her forward.

It is the feeling of knowing, and Suzanne tries to shake it off, to place her attention on the sums in front of her, but the numbers dance before her eyes, the sevens and the fives, the threes ballooning, blowing across the page.

“Mrs. Naylor,” she speaks softly, to herself. “Mrs. Naylor.” The roving woman stops, takes a step or two back and is now standing above her. Slap, slap. “Your brother. His car.”

This is the first time. Does the woman even have a brother? This is the first time it is someone she does not know.

“What?” the teacher bristles. “What about my brother?”

“His car. It’s burning.”

Mrs. Naylor turns a shade of off-white, like old paper. Is she angry? Sick? She drops the ruler on Suzanne’s desk and turns, leaving the classroom without a word.

There are one or two giggles from the children, but mostly there is silence. For it is one thing to make fun of Little Sue, another to make fun of her predictions.

Mrs. Naylor is gone for two weeks. There is the hospital time then the funeral, and Mrs. Naylor’s replacement in class, Mrs. McCrimmon, stands at the front and does not wander, and never, ever looks Suzanne in the eye. Suzanne notices that others, also, are acting this way now. At the lockers, where there was always much jostling and joking, there is only silence when Suzanne appears. No one pulls Suzanne’s hat off and throws it; no one pushes past her to get to his corner.

They have finally realized, they have all finally figured out that Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, never predicts good things. Oh, there are happy endings—the house fire, Mrs. Reidel’s coma—but they are only happy because people arrive in time to intervene.

Why have none of them ever seen this? So greedy were they for the jump on chaos that they saw each intervention as a triumph, their triumph, their mastery.

But Fire Engine Sue speaks chaos.

The next little while is confusing. Adele and Robert Cardinal are called in for meetings with the principal and the school board. Suzanne spends her afternoons reading at home or to Mrs. Reidel. It is nice to have the days again almost like it is summer, but with the cool shiver in the air. She thinks about the penguins. Will she ever be able to build them a shelter? Mrs. Craig at the library laughed at her, right in her face, right beside the SILENCE sign, when she told of her plans.

“Penguins don’t live here,” said the low voice of the librarian.

Penguins are not seen here now, Suzanne thinks, but that doesn’t mean anything. Look at Mr. Popper’s Penguins, that book Mrs. Reidel gave her. Doesn’t prove anything.

Suzanne walks home, a stick in her hand in case any dog wants to play, and she wonders. If she only sees the bad things that could happen, is there someone, some person out there who only sees the good? What would that person be like? Suzanne has tried not to see anything at all, to be like the girls and boys in her class, but when the feeling happens, she can’t help it. She wonders why it is that she brings the bad news. Where is the child who walks around lightly, spreading joy?

It is a weary, wary child who makes her way up the driveway to the house, who stands beneath the balcony where her little sister fell. A lock of Carla’s hair, a single curl, is in an envelope in her father’s desk. Suzanne has seen it twice, the dark swirl resting in its white sleeve.

“Come in, Suzanne.” Her mother at the window. “Suppertime.”

No homework. No school. Books piled on the table.

“We’ll work from home for now,” her father says, coughing from the mysterious illness that keeps him at home as well.

“I disturb,” she says to the small face in the mirror. She hears the word splash and surface, like a scary catfish, whenever her name is mentioned.

She is visiting a doctor in the city, Doctor Hargreaves. He is a tall man, like her father, with glasses on the tip of his nose. Sometimes he wears them on his head, and his hair eyes stare into the heavens. Or the fluorescent lights. He does not hurt her, and he does not frighten her, he just asks questions about what she does all day, about her pretend games.

“And when you get this feeling . . . is that what it is, Suzanne, is it a feeling? When you get this feeling, could you tell me what it’s like?”

The child shifts on the long leather sofa. Her mother is waiting outside; her father sits in the corner pretending to read. He pretends a lot, just like her.

“It . . .” What can she say about the blurting urge? “It’s a feeling of know—”

“No?”

“Like when you’re listening to a story and you think the child will get away or maybe they’ll get caught or maybe they’ll wake up and it’s all a dream and then you know, you just know, they’re gonna get caught.”

Dr. Hargreaves smiles. “Or maybe they get away.” He taps her head with his file folder.

“Yes,” Suzanne says, sliding off the couch. “But not when I get the feeling.”

There will be further visits. Dr. Hargreaves talks to Suzanne’s father, who is nodding.

In the car on the way back, there is not much talking. Suzanne’s mother has been to visit Aunt Sophie, who has passed along a new colouring book and crayons for Suzanne. The child sits in the back seat with the crayons all around her. She has broken one already, the forest-green one, possibly her favourite. She has overworked it, colouring the entire forest both underfoot and overhead, and in the green world, which has only a black-outlined frog in it, she has added a penguin in a penguin house.

I only get the bad news, she tells her doll, Annabelle, at night in bed. But if I let people know in time, they can maybe stop it. I bring the bad news, but it can still be good.

Her father is reading Alice in Wonderland to her. She knows the story by heart. The girl falls down the hole and everything changes. It’s just like Carla. Is her father crying as he reads of the girl tumbling head over heels, or is he just happy when she lands safe and sound?

“Papa, it’s just a story. Sometimes she goes through mirrors. She does it all the time.”

She has seen her father look in a mirror like he could fall through it, press his pale thin face up against the cold, shiny surface and feel it disappear.

“Papa,” Suzanne says, her little hand trying to encompass his.

When he cries, it is like a small animal fretting. It is not loud or scary. It’s a small sorrow, and Suzanne is not afraid and can hold his hand or, once, his head, and wait. Her Papa comes back, wipes his face and eyes. They have an ice cream cone, if there is any ice cream in the fridge. Or they go to the cold room in the basement and hunt for a bag of secret chocolate raisins.

This father of hers. She asks him, one morning, to put on his suit and tie. She says it’s dress-up day and puts on her tunic.

“See? I’m dressed.”

He goes into the bedroom and remains there a long time, but when he finally comes out he, too, is dressed. He is wearing the blue-grey suit and the tie Suzanne likes, the one with the dark red diamonds. His shirt is a little wrinkly, but he looks nice.

“Papa, your shoes.”

For the plaid slippers do not go with the outfit, despite the dark red in them. He finds his shoes under the living room chair and slowly, laboriously, bends to put them on.

“Beautiful, Papa. You’re beautiful.”

The man looks down at his daughter, her light brown hair in a ponytail, her tunic neat and collar straight.

“We’re all dressed up,” he says, “with nowhere to go.”

“Let’s go see Mommy!”

He has not heard her suggestion.

“Let’s go see Mommy at work!”

Most days Robert drives Adele to work, but when he is not well, she takes the bus that gets her close to the office. The town is not big, but the company she works for is on the very edge of town in the new business park. Suzanne climbs into the back seat. She finds a crayon that was lost and props it up in the car-door ashtray so she won’t forget it.

“Mommy will sure be surprised,” she says, but the man in the front seat hears her. His blue-grey shoulders go up and down, he sighs once, and starts the engine.

From the back seat, with her feet up, Suzanne watches the town go by sideways. Mrs. Reidel’s house cruises into view. Her trees are fighting with the wind. Soon it will snow, and they will rest.

“Will I go back to school?” she asks suddenly, as if it has just occurred to her that she might not.

Her father jerks his head to the right to let her know he is listening.

“Yes . . . of course you’ll go. But, listen, maybe . . . maybe we can make a little deal. Like, a secret between us, you know?”

“Oh, yes!” Suzanne inclines her face toward the secret as her father pulls into the parking lot of her mother’s building. He turns the engine off and swings around to face her.

“How about when you go back, you don’t tell people when you get a special feeling, okay? It will be our secret, just you and me and no one else. What do you think, Little Sue?”

Suzanne flips the thought over in her mind. It is not like she has any particular choice when it happens. Could she keep such a feeling inside? Would it hurt?

They walk into the reception area and take the stairs up to the second floor. Suzanne knows her mother’s desk. It is near the window, and she has a leaf plant there, drinking the sunlight.

But she is not at her desk. Suzanne recognizes the rock she has painted and given to her mother as a paperweight. It is sitting on the desk, and it is working; it is weighing down a bunch of papers that would otherwise fly away. Suzanne’s father is talking to the lady her mother works with, who is telling them that Mrs. Cardinal has gone out to lunch.

“It’s early for lunch,” Robert Cardinal observes, wondering whether or not to go home.

The woman tries not to stare, but she is studying the man they have all heard about, who stays home all day while his wife goes out to work, stays home with his child who, herself, does not go to school. The father of the child who died.

“Will she be back soon?” he asks.

The woman is vague about soon, about people being sick of the little restaurant in the business park.

“Please don’t tell her, then, that we were here. It was a surprise. The child’s surprise.”

They re-button their coats, and her Papa puts her hat on back to front. He holds his head up as they walk to the stairwell, as their steps echo on the way down.

They are getting in the car, they are in the car, in fact, when Suzanne sees a dark blue automobile pull into the space on the other side of the lot. The door slices open, and a man unfolds who might be Mommy’s boss but without the glasses. Then the other door.

“There! There’s Mommy! C’mon, Papa.”

She would have been out the door, but for the hand blocking the lock button.

“No . . . no,” her father whispers. “This will just be a secret, okay? Just a secret.”

He wrenches himself around and adjusts the rearview mirror, and Suzanne can see him holding the secret in. He is in pain, her Papa, but he is clamping it all in. Her Papa can do it. Maybe she can, too. The drive home is quiet, which gives her time to think.

Little Sue can keep secrets. She kept the one about the broken trophy at the back of the classroom, the result of a ball thrown by Alan Conway. In a way, Suzanne and her father are like spies, two secret agents on missions to save the world. Robert Cardinal and Fire Engine Sue.

In the winter, the path beside the river is filled up with snow, but Suzanne can get partway down, as far as the little clearing where she would like to build her penguin house.

Penguins like snow. It’s normal for them, like her beanbag chair is normal for her. She works hard and alone, packing snow, building up ridges. There will be levels, like steps, for them to come and go. She loves the way their wings flap just a little. The ones she saw at the zoo with Auntie Sophie flapped their wings a bit and did not so much fly as waddle over to the next rock. She could do that. Anyone could. She likes penguins, because they are not show-offs.

“A frozen home for you, like living in a popsicle.”

It would be too cold for her. Already her parents have warned her about the terribly cold temperatures this winter. She doesn’t feel it, except in her fingers and toes. They get wet and stay wet the entire afternoon. One more little flat part to make, and the first part of the penguin house will be finished. Wind whips around her ears, and she pulls her toque lower. She lies sideways in the snow, eyeing the level of the platform. It looks good. Even. Penguins could dance.

It is silent like this. Her left ear, pressed to the ground and muffled by the snow, hears nothing. Her right hears only the whisper of the wind. She lies there for a while, watching the snow “V” made by her mitten. It’s so quiet. The voices of her parents fade, the tears and the choked up words at night, like the song she liked that wouldn’t come in on the car radio, her parents’ voices and the car radio, fading in and out and getting buried when they drove through the tunnel.

She is cold, then not so cold. She is thinking of resting before heading back onto the windy pathway. She is supposed to stop at Mrs. Reidel’s to see if she needs anything, but she has worked hard, and she deserves a rest, just a short one. She lies in the snow waiting for the penguins to arrive.

When the feeling comes, she almost doesn’t know it. When it comes, she is comfortable and sleepy, and she feels nothing much, just weary and so cozy. The feeling works harder, pushing at the edges, jabbing at her with needle spikes.

“Ow . . .” she murmurs softly. Tiny shifting left and right.

Jab.

“Ow!”

She wants to sleep, just sleep. And then a girl is sleeping, too, and everybody’s crying. Her mother in a veil, her father’s knuckles white. There are flower smells, lilies and roses and those yellow things Mrs. Reidel grows.

And she must get up. She must push up from the soft world. White lights are burning into her, long corridors of light lead her forward, stumbling, incandescence of short candles, toward a village in the distance. Penguins. And home.

A girl in a blue cloth jacket and a red toque is found in a clearing by the river path. She is carrying no identification and is taken to the local clinic where Nurse Carter recognizes Suzanne and calls her parents.

Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, is going to the hospital in the next town, where the doctors will take her temperature, which everyone is watching like the stock market, and will take the baby finger on her right hand.

There will be consultation and wailing, but when Suzanne returns home, she will have one finger less to count on.

Cards arrive from the school, her mother’s work and a few of the children Suzanne knows. The church sends over fruit and a Bible, and Mrs. Reidel has Florence, her part-time helper, bring over a stuffed animal. It is only when Suzanne sees the squat funny penguin that she realizes Mrs. Reidel knows. She knows what happened in the clearing. What good is a gift if you can’t use it now and then, she’d say. She’d open the tin of biscuits, and they would munch conspiratorially, and the afternoon would slide like snow from the roof of a car.

In spring, when Suzanne is back at school (“no more strange feelings, not for a long time”), something happens in the town. Mr. Laturelle’s son, Frank, who has been away so long that Suzanne doesn’t remember him, returns. But not alone. No. He arrives with shoulder-length, matted hair, a beard and a girlfriend named Holly.

Holly is a hippie. That’s what Mrs. Craig at the library said. Holly has long, straight hair with a braid at either side of her face. She wears long cotton dresses with flowers and squiggles on them and sometimes a coat that is shorter than the dress or, when it is warmer, a shawl almost the same as Mrs. Reidel’s. Her glasses, too, are like Mrs. Reidel’s, round metal frames that sit on her nose or the top of her head.

Suzanne has seen her precisely three times so far, but Holly has fascinated her each time. The first time, it was still snowy out, and Holly was wearing old boots and the too-short coat. She was coming out of the IGA, and Suzanne was going in with her parents. Her mother moved aside completely to let Holly pass. As she did, the hippie girl looked right at Suzanne and said, “Can’t wait till we can wear sandals, eh?”

Which seemed like such a sensible thing to say that Suzanne replied, “Yeah, and shorts, too,” before feeling her arm yanked.

Suzanne has seen her on two other occasions, and the woman always seems to notice her.

And now Suzanne hears that Holly and Frank are going to have a baby. A baby! She didn’t even know they were married. And now it is Mrs. Craig’s voice that is rising in the library as she goes on about hell and handbaskets. She almost thumps the book on Suzanne’s missing finger.

“Oh . . . sorry, Little Sue. You go home now. It’s not safe for kids to be out on the street any more.”

Suzanne hasn’t seen Holly for a while. Frank is working in his father’s store, his hair in a ponytail and his beard shorter and less scraggly. She could ask Frank. The shop is on her way home, so it is no trouble to stamp her rainboots on the mat outside and open the door into this world of penny candy, fly-paper and sewing machine oil.

Frank is bringing a box out from the back of the store. He plops it down on the counter and brushes a wisp of wayward hair from his eyes. “Good afternoon, Ma’am. What can I do for you?”

She smiles. She isn’t Ma’am. Her mother is Ma’am.

“I have a fine collection of penny candy here, for the most discerning of buyers. Feast your eyes on the mountain of jujubes, and over there, the world’s largest jar of jellybeans. Really. It’s been documented. Or perhaps your taste runs to the more exotic?” He leaps over the counter like an excited rodent.

“Anise-seed balls. Anise from the far reaches of the earth, specially grown and harvested. Balls from the centre of the earth, harnessed at great peril by intrepid ball-collectors.”

She is staring at Frank.

He stops. “Okay, so what is it? I’m trying to keep from going crazy here.”

“How could you go crazy in here. There’s so much!”

He casts his glance around and lets it rest on the floor mops in the corner.

“Yeah,” he says with a nod. “You’re right.”

“How is Holly? That’s why I came.”

Frank comes around from the counter and crouches beside her.

“Do you know something? You’re the first person who’s asked. The very first. My lady is fine, if you can call throwing up in the toilet all morning fine.”

“Throwing up.”

“It’s a having-baby thing. She’s okay, just a little tired. She’s resting more these days.”

“Because I haven’t seen her.”

“Yeah. Like I say. How do you know Holly?”

“We . . . uh . . . we . . . talk a little.”

“Well, I’d be happy to tell her you asked. What’s your name?”

“Oh, she doesn’t know . . . it’s Suzanne. Sue. Fire Engine Sue.” She pops her mouth shut. Why has that come out?

Frank steps back to look at her. “You’re Fire Engine Sue? I’ve been wanting to meet you. I didn’t realize you were so young. You’re the girl who predicted the broken leg outside the store.”

Suzanne closes her eyes. “I’m sorry. Your father . . . it’s just that . . . I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“I’ve heard other things as well. I’m very happy to know you, Suzanne. And I’m sure my lady will be pleased you asked after her. Maybe you can come around and visit her sometime.”

Suzanne nods and shifts a little toward the door. “I . . . gotta go.”

“Right. Hey, wait!”

He leaps over the counter again and digs beneath it, retrieving a large peppermint stick. “A gift. No charge.”

“I’m not . . .”

“Allowed? Hey, maybe it is a little on the ostentatious side, candy-wise. Plus, it’s hard to hide. How ’bout a gum ball? You should see where the ball collectors travel to find those. Rubber trees in the rainforest . . .”

He is about to go off on a story again, so she selects one.

“White. Nobody picks white.”

She smiles at him. “Doesn’t stain your mouth,” she says before dropping it in.

A few days later, Suzanne knocks at the door. She is carrying a crêpe and pipe-cleaner flower she has made in class. It is red, and she has sprayed some of her mother’s Shalimar on it, so it smells. She knocks again. This time she hears thumpy footsteps. The apartment is above the hardware store, and she has never been there before.

Creeaaakkkk. Funny that the hardware door creaks.

“Hello,” she says, holding out the drooping flower.

The woman is Holly, only she looks tired and stretched out like a rag on Mrs. Reidel’s clothesline. Her hair looks like strings.

“Hi there. Frank said you were visiting. Come in, come in. Is this for me?”

Suzanne nods. “I made it in school.”

“It’s . . . lovely . . . I . . .” And Holly sneezes an elaborate sneeze worthy of Suzanne’s father.

“I put perfume in it.”

Holly nods and carries the flower down the hall. “Take your coat off,” she calls. When she returns, she has a tray in her hands.

“Sit down. Take the load off.”

Suzanne does as she is told and sits neatly on the edge of a bench along the wall. It looks like it could have come out of a church. She runs her hand along the edge.

“Yes, neat, eh? We found it in a field.”

Suzanne tucks her hands in her lap as she has seen people do on TV. She notices that she always tucks the missing finger underneath, the place where the real finger would be.

“Juice? It’s really good. Mango and orange and, I think, some other tropical fruit.”

Suzanne only knows orange, but she agrees to a glass. There are lumpy cookies on a plate that Holly passes her. They are huge and a little strange, and she is about to decline when Holly adds, “I made these myself.” So Suzanne selects the closest one, as she has been taught, and holds it cautiously.

“Frank said you were asking about me.”

“Yes,” she almost whispers. “I didn’t see you for a long time.”

“No, well, did he tell you why? That I’m going to have a baby?” She smiles and for a second looks like the Holly who had come to town.

“I didn’t know people could have babies if they weren’t married.”

“Oh, people can do a lot of things without getting married.”

“Don’t you want to? Get married?”

The woman stands up, her hand on her stomach, and paces the small room. “No. I mean, you don’t need to. Frank and I love each other. I mean, there are people out there who tell you things, but they don’t know. People who try to run your life, you know?”

Suzanne nods, turning over her cookie.

“Sesame seeds, if you’re wondering. And sunflower.”

Seeds like the birdseeds in Mrs. Reidel’s feeder.

“Do people ever try to run your life? I’m sorry . . . what should I call you, Suzanne?”

The girl shrugs. “People call me lots of things . . . too.”

“I’ve heard names. Why do they call you those things, Suzanne?”

“They don’t mean anything. Even Mrs. Reidel calls me Little Sue sometimes. It’s just a name.”

“And Fire Engine Sue? That’s just a name as well?”

Suzanne shifts uncomfortably. This is getting near the edges of her secret. She promised Papa. “People say stuff ’cause they don’t know me. What are you going to call your baby?” ’

The cookie is tastier than she thought it would be, the raisins soft.

“Names?” Holly laughs. “We haven’t talked about it yet. The baby is only about this big right now.”

She holds her fingers apart to reveal an alarmingly miniature imaginary baby. Suzanne blinks. Baby always means Carla, Carla in her crib while the home fills up with smoke. This is hardly real. How can Holly believe it?

“How do you know?” Suzanne reaches for another cookie.

“Well, that’s how long it takes. I won’t have the baby for months and months, and it will be growing all along, and then I’ll be this big.” She holds out her arms around a huge air stomach. “Did you ever see a pregnant woman? Really big?”

Suzanne gulps down a chunk of cookie. She can almost remember her mother tottering around with a tummy balloon, a green top covering it like a grassy hill. Her mother lying on her side, and the hill so green and safe. Carla.

Suzanne visits Holly often over that season, pressing her hands up against the growing baby through the filmy Indian cotton shirt. Sometimes Holly is resting when she arrives (Frank has given the child a key), and she sets about dusting or tidying up the cramped apartment. Once she finds a striped baby set—pants, top and a little bonnet. She wonders whether Holly found it in the city, or whether someone sent it as a gift. She hopes it is a gift.

Time goes slowly, then more quickly. School ends. Suzanne is once more free, and she can visit both Mrs. Reidel and Holly on the same day. The houses dress for summer, with hanging plants, trimmed hedges and bird feeders. There are sprinklers on many front lawns. A person can stay entirely wet all summer if they know where to go. On Suzanne’s own property, a spitting sprinkler sprays a semi-circle of grass. No one turns it to water the other half. No one seems to notice or care. The lawn responds with a rich green crescent that is kind of like a filled-in fairy ring.

Robert Cardinal’s summer allergies have worsened; his eyes are always red, and his nose runs. He sits indoors at the kitchen table doing crossword puzzles or playing solitaire. Sometimes he reads the paper. In the evenings he might take a walk, and his daughter goes along with him.

He never speaks to her about the secret, his or hers. They are two spies, tight-lipped, too clever by far to risk untold danger by opening their big mouths. So they stroll along, listening to the peepers and the bullfrogs, the man listening only to the noise, and the child to the song. One evening, fireflies. One evening, june bugs, attracted to the street lights, their bodies clicking on the pavement as they fall. He points above him and tells her of planetary dust, of polestars and the naming of stars. And he says, “I don’t know if your mother will go away.”

The words hang there, like fireflies flashing. It is dark, but she sees his face every time they pass under a street light. He has a long, thin face, her Papa. Longer and thinner than ever.

“She might. She might go. I don’t know,” he says.

The bugs crawl to the light, flitting their wings. Suzanne puts her hand into the clammy hand of her father, and they walk as far as the deserted ballpark before turning back toward the house.

Adele Cardinal does not go away, though observers might debate this, for she works late three nights a week and is distracted when she is at home. When Suzanne tells her a story about a river and a canoe, she stares right through the girl as though the river and the canoe and even Suzanne do not exist. When Robert Cardinal holds the chair for her at supper, she doesn’t even acknowledge the chair, let alone the gesture.

They are three people with their secrets. It is like the TV show, like the Cone of Silence on Get Smart, where the Chief can’t hear what Agent 86 is saying. Aunt Sophie calls in the evenings, and Adele goes into the bedroom with the phone, the extension cord stretched so tight around the door that there are no more coils in it.

One evening when they are home, the feeling comes again. Suzanne is playing with her horses: all five plastic horses are in this game, and the kleenex box corral is on her bed, so she is fenced in. This makes her laugh, because it is just like that song she heard, and she sings “Don’t Fence Me In” as she puts up her makeshift barriers. She doesn’t know what all the words mean: cottonwood, though it is supposed to be some kind of tree; cayuse, no idea. She wonders about the Western Sky, and whether it is the only place you can wander over yonder.

And then it is upon her. She is not allowed out at night except with a parent, and she has promised and promised. She looks at the horses. Her baby doll pyjamas are too lightweight, so she pulls her pedal-pushers over them and throws on her squall jacket. Her window is next to the tree. She has done this before, though never at night.

Lifting the window sash, she edges across the frame and feels with her foot for the crook in the tree. Yes. The rest is a blur as she pushes off into the tree and wriggles down the trunk. She’s cut her leg; she can feel it. Dropping to the ground, she is already running, racing along, sockless in her sneakers, past Mrs. Reidel’s house, past the IGA, to the apartment on top of the hardware store.

She bangs at the door, trying to catch her breath, bent over from the exertion. The door opens slowly, and Frank’s bushy head peers around.

“What the . . . what are you doing here, Suzanne?” He holds the door wide for her, and she tumbles in. “You’re a pleasure always, but I have to say this is a little inconvenient. Holly is asleep, and I was just about to head off myself . . . Hey, what’s wrong?”

Suzanne speaks slowly, fighting the words every step of the way.

“Holly’s got to go to the hospital.”

Frank pulls a cigarette paper from the packet. “What, now?”

“When . . . when she has the baby. She has to be in the hospital.”

Frank shakes his head. “You know how she feels. She wants to have this baby naturally. None of that pumped-up crap for her. She’s a natural woman, and she . . .”

“Frank!”

Frank stops. The little girl is crying. She is frantic. She is Fire Engine Sue.

“Why? Can you tell me that? Why, Suzanne?”

“She’s gonna need a doctor.”

“The baby . . . Christ . . . Tell me what you mean!”

He grabs her as if to shake her but just holds her as she says, “The baby will need the doctor.”

They sit together on the paisley couch. Frank’s eyes are filling, and Suzanne’s are how dry. She sits with Frank for a while. He drives her back home in his Volkswagen, leaving her three houses away, at her request.

Because Frank cried, she knows he believed her. Holly will be okay, Suzanne tells herself, pulling up the tree hand over hand.

She sits on her bed, the horses haphazard on the floor. One horse is in her hand, and she sucks on the plastic fetlock. She broke her word to her father.

Broken promises or lies.

Or a little baby dies.

They take her to the midway, a place she has never asked to go. They also bring along Annie Fournier, a new-ish girl from one street over whose mother works at the same company as Suzanne’s mother. Both are only children. Neither likes the midway.

“It’ll be fun, that’s why,” Adele explains.

Her daughter’s silence somehow infuriates.

“You need to get out more. She’s the same age as you are. And it’s the midway! When I was your age, I couldn’t wait for it to come to town!”

Suzanne puts on her blue jeans and the bright flowered top that is getting too small, removes it, and pulls on an oversized T-shirt.

Annie Fournier arrives with a plastic bag in tow. She doesn’t exactly scowl at Suzanne, but she makes it wordlessly clear that this is not her idea either. The girls sit side by side in the living room while Mrs. Cardinal bustles in the kitchen, putting things in her carry-all.

Suzanne’s father is outside at the car, throwing Suzanne’s candy bar wrappers into a small bucket he keeps handy but never handy enough. Soon they are off, and the dreaded silence fills the back seat where the two child islands float. When Robert Cardinal turns a corner, the islands bump, lightly, but otherwise remain two distinct land masses.

“Well, come on, girls! What’s your favourite ride, Annie? Which one are you really looking forward to?” Mr. Cardinal glances back.

It turns out Annie Fournier likes the midway. It is just Suzanne she does not like.

“Maybe the Wild Mouse. Do you think they’ll have a Salt and Pepper this year?”

Mr. Cardinal signals out the window. “Wouldn’t know. Kind of a big contraption. We haven’t gone to the midway in a long time, so you probably know more about it than we do. When was the last time we went, Adele?”

Mrs. Cardinal jerks out of her thoughts and shakes her head. “Long time. Suzanne was only five or so. The year of the fire, I think.”

Suzanne is stunned. “I been there before?”

She remembers nothing at all of midways, rides. They must be mistaken. “What rides did I like?”

Mrs. Cardinal shakes her head. “Oh, you were too young and too small for any of the big rides, but you did like the kiddie-world merry-go-round, and the little boats, and you and Carla . . .”

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.

Silence in the front seat now, as Robert pulls into the makeshift parking lot. Annie Fournier jabs a fingernail into Suzanne’s right arm and whispers, “Too scared for any of the real rides. Big surprise. Maybe you can go on the little boats again.”

Suzanne follows the procession onto the grounds of the midway.

This Annie Fournier is not an evil girl. Suzanne cannot say she is evil. But she is a girl with plans. A crafty girl, as Mrs. Reidel might say. She has already wrapped her hand around the arm of Mr. Cardinal for the walk over to the hot dog stand, and now she is attempting to insinuate herself into Mrs. Cardinal’s good graces. Hah. Mrs. Cardinal is not going to hold her hand, or rub her back when she is scared. Still, the new girl is beaming up at Mrs. Cardinal and is getting a smile back that Suzanne only remembers.

The hot dogs are cold. There is a bug in the relish.

“What’s wrong with you? Eat up! We only have another hour to go on the rides!”

Mr. Cardinal is buoyant, cleaning up his hot dog and chasing Annie Fournier around to grab handfuls of her cotton candy.

“Oh, Robert, get your own,” Mrs. Cardinal laughs. Laughs!

“You done?” Adele scoops up Suzanne’s hot dog and wipes the girl’s mouth with a paper serviette. Then it is back on the rides. The Wild Mouse is next, and Annie has convinced the Cardinals to put Suzanne on it with her. Her eyes glow in the reflection of the flaking bulbs that line the path to the ride. Suzanne is bolted in beside Annie. The ride commences. Suzanne’s head is forced back like a giant invisible hand pressing her forehead. Round and back, this way and that, slammed forward, thrust back. Annie Fournier’s head is the same as hers, forward and back. Noise. Lights. It is too much, too . . .

When she vomits, she decorates the car, but mostly she decorates Annie Fournier. Suzanne sees a shriek frozen on Annie’s face. Anger, incredulity. When the ride stops, the attendant grunts at the girls to get out. Annie Fournier spills off the ride and runs to the exit screaming and crying. Mrs. Cardinal takes her hand and tries to wipe her shirt before moving away with her. Suzanne staggers to the exit as the attendant hoses down the car. Her father is there waiting for her.

“Sorry, Papa,” she murmurs, not trusting herself to open her mouth.

Her father steers her head toward the car. “Didn’t know your aim was that good,” he says.

She hears no more of Annie Fournier for a while. But one day Mrs. Cardinal comes home from work with the idea that it would be lovely if Annie Fournier came over once a week to play.

“With you?” Suzanne asks.

“No, with you.”

Why do they do this? Why can’t they leave her alone? Suzanne looks around her bedroom, determined to hide anything of real value. Her rocks, her doll, Annabelle, the key chain with the rubber dog, the horses with the chewed fetlocks. No way will Annie Fournier get her treasures.

Summer spins into fall, and Annie Fournier’s visits continue. On the other side of town, at the James Street Hospital, Holly gives birth to a healthy boy. People in town are ambivalent. While they don’t approve of her non-wedded state, they certainly wish her and the child no ill.

They reserve most of their disdain for Frank, who carries the baby around like he owns it.

Frank and Holly and the baby find Suzanne on the way to the library. Holly is pushing the baby in an old pram that squeaks. Frank is making faces into the pram.

“Suzanne! We were looking for you the last few days! We didn’t want to go by your house,” Frank added. Nod and a wink.

“He wanted to thank you,” Holly says, coming round to kiss and hug Suzanne.

“I did have complications. If I hadn’t been in hospital . . . well . . . thank you so much.”

Suzanne looks into the pram. Tiny-fingered child, eyes and fists clenched tight. Dark wisps of hair, and the red and white toque in this chill air.

“His name is Maurice Falcon, but we’re going to call him Falcon.”

Falcon.

“Keen of eye, strong of flight,” says Frank.

“I like his name,” Suzanne says. “Just don’t call him Little Falcon.”

“Or Fire Engine Falcon, right? Whoa! That has a ring to it, though.”

“You’ll come and visit sometime?”

Suzanne nods. “I hope so,” she smiles at the happy family.

She does not get any feelings and does not know that by Christmas, Frank will have left town for greener pastures.

Too bad Annie Fournier wouldn’t just disappear. Fold up and get tucked away somewhere like the registration sheet for Brownies that her mother lost that fall.

They are in Suzanne’s room. Annie Fournier has appropriated Suzanne’s Barbie doll. She is amazed that Suzanne has only one.

“Me, I have six, almost.”

Suzanne does not want to know about the “almost” doll. Truth is Suzanne has not figured out the hard-bodied dolls, so different from Annabelle, and so unresponsive compared to the frogs by the river. Annie Fournier can have the doll if she wants it. Maybe she’ll leave the other stuff alone.

“How come you have so many Barbies? How come your mother buys you so many?”

Annie snorts. “She’s not my mother! I got no mother. I just live there ’cause they tell me to.”

This is news.

Annie Fournier, whose mother works with Mrs. Cardinal, has no mother?

“She fosters. She’s no mother to me.”

This is a world Suzanne does not know at all, a world of no mothers or fathers, where children travel across town or between towns to live with people who are not their parents. She doesn’t know what to say to Annie Fournier.

“Are you sad? That you have no parents?”

Annie Fournier is edging a Barbie earring into the plastic smiling head.

“Doesn’t matter. She gives me all the Barbies, right?”

They sit in unaccustomed silence.

No mother or father. Suzanne can’t understand it. When Carla was gone, it was so strange, like one part of the house disappearing, like you’d walk down the hall to go into a room, but the room wasn’t there any more. You opened the door into a blank. No parents? Like there was no house at all.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Suzanne knows something is going on. Her parents are actually excited about the season again, decorating the house with the vinyl wreath, the fake poinsettias. They’re going to get a real Christmas tree after a couple of years of artificial. Her father, despite his terrible health, has spent all of one Saturday putting up lights outside. The porch roof, the banister. He comes back inside red-faced and not coughing. Suzanne watches carefully as she gums a social tea biscuit.

And then they tell her. It is all arranged. Annie Fournier will not be coming over once a week to play with her. Annie Fournier will be moving in, living with the Cardinals, sharing Suzanne’s room!

Suzanne sits back in the armchair.

“There’s no . . . but there’s no room . . . in my room . . .” she sputters.

They can’t mean this. She’s had no feeling, no warning.

“It’s the same size it was. You would have shared it, eventually, with Carla.”

The name so plainly spoken. Carla slipping down under the earth.