Bad Ideas Page 4

  “Sure, babe. Just for a minute. It’s chilly out there.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Maybe we can go to the park at the Point. You can go on the swings.”

  “Yeah!” Mercy was on her knees on the passenger seat, her head and shoulders leaning out into the wind. “Hooray!”

  Trudy reached over and tugged her back into the car by the back of her jacket. “But first I want to drive down Old Murphy Road.”

  “No! That’s boring, Trudy. I want to go to the park!”

  Trudy said nothing, just turned on the radio, signalled left, and pulled off the highway onto Farley Road and then onto Old Murphy. Glum, Mercy slumped down in her seat and watched the trees go by. Trudy slowed down as trees gave way to pasture and pavement turned to gravel. “Baby, look! Horses!”

  “No. I’m not looking.”

  “Mercy, these are the prettiest horses I’ve ever seen.” She pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Come on.”

  Trudy killed the engine and opened her door. Mercy got out, too, staring at her feet as she went but clearly warming to the adventure. Trudy helped her across the ditch, lifting her over the water rushing at the bottom, and they made their way toward the field. Leaning against the log fence, they could see the horses in the distance. Two of them, white as snow, the sun lighting them up like lanterns against the blue sky and green grass. Mercy sighed, her cheeks pink from the cool spring air. “Trudy, I think those are unicorns!”

  Trudy laughed. “I don’t know, sweetie. They don’t have any horns.”

  “That’s just because they’re too young. Those are unicorns. UNICORNS! COME HERE!”

  One of the horses lifted its head and stared. Mercy squeezed Trudy’s hand and stood perfectly still. “I think they’re coming over,” she whispered. “Stand still.”

  Both horses were staring now. One of them threw its head back and whinnied. The other nodded and both of them started to walk toward the fence. Mercy was twitching, fidgeting, trying to control the urge to jump up and down. “OK, unicorns,” she whispered. “Just a little bit closer.”

  The horses kept coming and Trudy started to get nervous. She had never been very close to a horse before and could not quite believe the size of them as they approached the fence. She took two steps back, taking Mercy with her. The horses pressed their chests against the fence and leaned their heads down toward them. Trudy could feel their hot breath. Their nostrils flared. Mercy took a small, careful step toward the fence. One horse took a step back but the other leaned closer. She reached her small hand out and ran it down over the horse’s nose.

  Trudy was holding her breath.

  The horse leaned down and nuzzled Mercy’s kangaroo pockets, nudging her belly, knocking her back a step. Mercy held her hands above her head as though the horse was a bandit and this was a holdup. The horse snorted, backed up, turned, and walked away. The other followed. Trudy let her breath out. “Jesus!”

  Back in the car, Mercy said, “That was a unicorn, Trudy. I could tell. His nose was so soft.”

  Right before the railroad tracks on Old Murphy Road, down a long dirt lane, was an old red-brick farmhouse sinking into the swampy earth beside a shallow bay thick with rushes at the shore. A car was parked in the front yard, and tire tracks made muddy trenches in the grass. A sprawling willow tree leaned into the water. Trudy took her foot off the gas and glided past the lane. A plywood sign hung from a post. Jules Tremblay Headquarters spray-painted red in stencilled letters. She pulled over onto the shoulder and killed the engine, looking at the house in the rear-view mirror. Mercy climbed over the front seat and tumbled into the back to look out the back window. “Who lives there, Trudy?”

  “Nobody.” They sat for a few minutes in silence.

  “What if my mom lives there?”

  “That would be a surprise.”

  “Trudy, I miss my mom sometimes.”

  “I know, hon.”

  Trudy caught sight of Jules’s old Pontiac GTO coming up behind them, turning into the laneway. Flat black, it looked like someone had painted it with house paint and a roller. Probably rusted to dust under there. Likely paint was the only thing holding it together. Edgy, she started the car and pulled out, heading for the highway. “Let’s go to the park, pal.”

  “I don’t want to go to the park anymore. I want to go home.”

  Trudy looked at her niece in the rear-view mirror. Curled up with her arms crossed, her chin pressed into her chest, her knees drawn up. There were acres of car seat around her. She was a tiny little thing. Just a speck.

  “Or we could visit some friends. What would you think of that?” Trudy slowed down, looking for a place to turn around.

  “What friends?” Suspicious but hopeful, Mercy sat up in her seat.

  “Our new friends, remember?” Trudy pulled into a lane between two cornfields, came to an abrupt stop, and backed out heading back the way they came.

  “Cowboys!” shouted Mercy.

  “Sure. Cowboys,” said Trudy.

  And she headed back to HQ.

  Claire

  Because you can’t just lay down and die

  Trudy was right. It was true that Claire wasn’t angry at Darren, that she daydreamed every day about his return. About how he would walk through the door and tell her he had been wrong to leave, that he hadn’t been happy for a second without her, that wild horses could not drag him away again. And she would tell him that she had done her best with the girls, that he had a granddaughter. She would tell him that she had waited, that she had been true. That no man had touched her since the day he left. Not one. Not once.

  (Not that anyone cared to believe this. There was no redemption in Preston Mills. The evidence was clear: two children with a married man by the time she was eighteen, her own daughter pregnant at sixteen. She had been a bad girl and now she was a bad mother. Her own parents barely spoke to her. Unless the rent was due. She had the sad life she deserved. End of story.)

  Oh, and wouldn’t they all be surprised! Her parents, her daughters, everyone at the factory. The busybodies at the coffee shop. How surprised they would be to see that tall strong man on her arm! They would see the way the girls had his eyes and not her own. Those clear blue eyes. Claire didn’t believe for a minute that Darren loved his wife, that he had other children. It was not possible. It did not square with the dream she dreamed. And without that dream, what did she have? If she dared to look at the world without that rosy tint, what would she see?

  A tiny house.

  A gruelling job.

  A missing daughter.

  An empty bank account.

  An old flannelette sheet and a shabby moth-eaten blanket pulled out of an end table every night. A thirty-nine-year-old woman with blond hair and black roots, sleeping alone on a lumpy hide-a-bed. Unloved, disrespected, alone. In a town made of mud and gravel and weeds. Inhabited by bullies and gossips. Brutes and harpies.

  That’s what.

  So she kept her eye on the prize. Inside Claire’s head was a running narrative, telling her story. The story of a princess abandoned and forgotten, mistaken for a scullery maid, biding her time, awaiting the return of her prince. Her patience would be rewarded. Those who doubted her were to be forgiven for taking her at face value, for believing that she was only what she seemed.

  But she knew better. She was the star of this movie. And it would have a happy ending.

  Otherwise, she might as well just give up. She might as well just lie down on the dirty kitchen floor and die.

  Because it wasn’t called “The Number Two” for nothing

  Claire always had a flair for fantasy. It had not gone unnoticed. It began with a pair of shoes. In 1955 in Preston Mills, ladies’ shoes were available in black, brown, and — in the summertime — white. The only way to get shoes of any other colour was to go downtown to Mackenzie’s D
ry Cleaners and order a pair of cloth bridesmaid’s shoes. Plain white satin pumps that could be dyed any colour to match any dress. When she was sixteen, the year she met Darren, Claire had saved up enough money, cut a tiny piece of cotton from the hem of her favourite dress so she could match the colour precisely, and ordered her shoes. Size 7, narrow. Candy-floss pink. Then she waited six weeks for them to arrive.

  She had also gone down to Jameson’s Pharmacy and purchased a half-dozen packets of Dylon Intense Rose fabric dye and spent her evenings during that spring dying all of her white blouses and sweaters, white socks, white brassieres and underpants a bright, vivid, rosy pink. She dyed her brown hair Miss Clairol Shade Number 129: Butter Cream Blonde. And when she walked down the street, it was as though she left a trail of fairy dust behind her. Or sugar. Men couldn’t take their eyes off her. Her figure like the number eight, her fluffy blond hair, her flushed cheeks and black lashes, her pink sweater, pink dress, pink shoes. Her pink chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. She was like sexy, walking candy.

  Being sexy candy, Claire made enemies of most of the girls in Preston Mills. They shook their heads, fake-coughed into their hands, saying, Whore! as she walked by. They spread outrageous rumours about her. That she had sex in the bathroom of the gas station or behind the bar at the legion hall. That she had a third nipple, a second vagina. Or no vagina at all. Herpes. Scabies. Warts. They would say anything to taint the fantasies their boyfriends were surely having about her.

  Not that those girls had ever liked her anyway, had ever trusted her. It seemed to Claire that not even her parents had ever really liked her. Yeah? Well, fuck them! That’s what Claire’s only friend, Nancy Meyers, said. Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke. At eighteen, Nancy had seemed so much older than Claire, so much more at ease in the world. They had made friends on a smoke break outside the mill one day. Nancy had moved to Preston Mills from Brockville to get a job and to be closer to Jason MacNeill, the fuck-up. The dick-weed. A short-lived romance, Nancy would call it. The bloom was off that rose in short order. But who cared? Nancy Meyers said that it was raining men in Cornwall. Just a half-hour drive away, there were tens of thousands of new men, working men, from across Canada. Even from the States.

  Those men were going to dig canals, build new roads, dam the river, and flood almost every shitty little town along Highway 2, including Preston Mills.

  Good riddance!

  They didn’t call that highway “The Number Two” for nothing. That cowpat-spotted, pothole-covered, thistle-lined highway. Bring it on, giggled Nancy and Claire. Buh-bye, Preston Mills!

  Because love at first sight is real

  That first night at the Pioneer Hotel in Cornwall, Claire saw him standing alone at the end of the bar. Tall, strong, sandy-haired, and sad-looking. Stubble on his chin, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. The pack rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt. The filthiest fingernails she had ever seen. That gold ring gleaming against the brown skin of the ring finger of his left hand. He looked up and smiled tightly, shyly. She saw it, the idea of her, passing across his face. The blond girl with the pink shoes and her big, mean-eyed friend, parking themselves at the bar as if they were old enough to drink. He drained his glass and walked away. Out the door to the parking lot, into his truck before she could catch his eye one more time.

  Before she could smile that smile again.

  And just like it was in every corny movie she had ever seen, the sight of him had filled her up with fantasies of a new life. She thought she had seen her future when she saw that man at the bar. (Years later, in that shoebox house back in Preston Mills, tears would fill her eyes when she thought of it. How strong and pure her hope had been. How fully and simply she had expected a grown man to come into her life and take her away from this place. How she had expected to become something better.

  But Darren Robertson was no prince.

  He was hardly even a man. He was just a boy, transplanted from some other sad small town not much different from her own.)

  Claire followed him out to the parking lot as though she were in a dream, as though the normal rules of life had been suspended. As though love at first sight were real. He looked at her through the windshield and shook his head. No way. He shooed her away with his hand, as you would a dog. She turned around and walked slowly back across the parking lot to the bar, her pink heels sinking into the soft mud, the street lights shining down on her like a spotlight. He would be back the next night. And she would be waiting for him, her Butter Cream hair perfectly teased and sprayed, her pink sweater straining across her chest.

  And her heart bursting with fervent, crushing teenage love.

  Because there was no stopping it

  Claire had met Darren Robertson in April. By June, she was pregnant.

  But to tell it that way, to lay out these few bare facts — he was married and away from home, she was a small-town girl with a bad reputation, they met in a bar, she got pregnant — to tell it like this, was wrong. These facts lead you to obvious conclusions: that she was easy, that he was callous and irresponsible, that her pregnancy was a tragedy. None of this was true. To get to the truth of it, the truth that her daughters would never believe, you had to tell the story right. You had to try to explain the feelings you had when you did the wrong things.

  First, for example, people might be surprised to find out that in spite of her hair and wardrobe, her knockout body, Claire had been a virgin when she met Darren. In Preston Mills, boys had kept their distance. They hated and feared her. The propaganda campaign executed by the local girls had worked exactly as planned. The only person Claire had ever kissed was her friend Nancy, “for practice.”

  Second, Darren loved her. This was a fact. And he loved her more than he loved his wife. Here is how she could tell: every word, every laugh, every kiss, every beautiful thing between them made him sadder. And every stupid thing about her made him love her more. When she finally wore him down, after they had finally kissed in the front seat of his truck, he had put his hand on her shoulder, held her at arm’s length, and hung his head like a sad old dog. He looked up to heaven like a suffering saint. And then he sighed and leaned in for more.

  When he finally took her to his trailer and unbuttoned her blouse and pushed her skirt up her legs, he laughed when he saw her home-dyed pink bra and panties and, later, when he saw the faint pink shadowy outline of her on his white sheets, the smudge of Dylon Rose. But after they finally did it, after they finally took off all their clothes and pressed their naked bodies together, after he slowly, carefully pushed his way inside her and they both felt like they would die of terror and relief, when it was all over and they lay breathing heavily into each other’s necks, he cried like a baby. He cried because, like her, he felt lost, hopeless, and wrong. In love.

  And there was no stopping it.

  Because you can definitely make the same mistake twice

  You might think that Darren and Claire were hoping for the best as they had sex over and over again at the height of their young blossoming fertility, or that they were blind to the probable consequence of their incessant coupling. But you would be wrong. They knew Claire would likely get pregnant, and, unreasonably, they had wished for it. They wished for a baby. Because this wish was somehow, in the haze of 1950s’ romance, inseparable from their love. Because the force of it was irresistible.

  And they knew there would be no making it right. But being right was not what mattered. What mattered was the thrilling, doomed, happy-miserable, love-drugged dream they were living. What mattered was the way collapsing into each other’s arms blotted out all the pain and worry and daily harassment of their lives.

  And you might think that Claire would make this mistake only once. This terrible miscalculation that landed her back in her furious parents’ house, begging to be allowed to keep her baby, promising she would be a good mother if they would just help her. But you would be wrong again. She woul
d make it twice. For Tammy and Trudy were full-blooded sisters, born of the one great love of Claire’s life.

  Love of my life, thought Claire, staring out the kitchen window. Words. Words that always seemed corny unless it was you. Unless it was you saying these things to the person you love. The person who made you feel like your heart was being crushed. These embarrassing things they said to each other, Darren and Claire, that they meant with all of their hearts. The things they would say again and again. Like they were under a spell. They were all true.

  I love you.

  I have never loved anyone like I love you.

  I will never love anyone this way again.

  Nothing else matters.

  Never leave me.

  Think of me always.

  You are everything to me.

  I am nothing without you.

  Nothing.

  She had not, of course, thought any of it through. She had only been helpless against it. And so after he had gone, she found herself stranded in Preston Mills, even lower on the social food chain than she had been before, facing condemnation everywhere she went, struggling to be something she had no idea how to be: a mother.

  Darren, of course, had returned regularly to his wife in New Brunswick for visits and, eventually, for good.

  He could see no other way.

  The last time he saw his daughters was on Tammy’s second birthday. Trudy had been three. At Claire’s instruction, she called him Uncle Dee.

  Kiss your Uncle Dee goodbye, Trudy. He has to go.

  Tammy told Claire she didn’t remember Darren. She didn’t remember standing, holding hands with her mother and her sister, watching his truck kick up dust as it pulled away and raced down the road, as it became smaller and smaller, until it disappeared over the horizon. She didn’t remember how long the little girls stood at the end of the driveway, terrified and confused, waiting for their mother to stop crying.