Girl Runner Read online

  7

  Fall

  “IT’S GONNA BE FINE,” the girl announces over her shoulder, but it isn’t clear to whom she is speaking, to me or to Max, the young man beside me fiddling with the camera. Besides which, this is hardly a reassuring declaration, as anyone with sense would know. Young lady, you should pay more attention to the road, I say. That was a red light. Here’s another.

  The car screeches to a halt and I’m launched against the seat belt with a groan.

  “Do I need to drive?” Max looks up. He’s transferred his attention to a different screened device, which he cradles between his hands, looking down as if in prayer. He can’t leave it for more than a moment. He bows his head and taps on it with his thumbs.

  “I’m good,” the girl growls through her teeth, pressing the gas pedal with more enthusiasm than necessary.

  “Then drive like you know what you’re doing.”

  “You sound like Dad.”

  “You drive like Mom.”

  Ah. Siblings.

  We’re passing dull buildings, low to the ground, a huddle of ugly boxes that open, abruptly, onto wet ploughed cornfields and sky. She speeds up, and the fields fold one into another and I think it unlikely that it will matter whether or not I pay attention. I close my eyes.

  Some while later, I am jostled out of a rough sleep, tossed to one side as we take a corner precipitously. I press my hands to my cheeks. Warm. Am I sick?

  “Roll down your window.” There is a young man beside me. He leans forward to get the girl’s attention, pulling from one of her ears a slender white cord. “Turn it off, she’s awake again.” His thumbs click, click, click.

  She cracks the windows, but I see she’s disobeyed his other order. One of the slender cords rides up her hair and into her left ear.

  Her hair is whipping in the wind, and she turns to grin at us. “Do you recognize anything, Mrs. Smart?”

  “Not far now,” says Max, as if to reassure himself.

  “I’m getting butterflies!” the girl is shouting with some excitement. Her mood seems highly changeable.

  The road we’re travelling is freshly paved and looks to have been widened in the process. There are no trees on either side, just steep muddy ditches.

  In answer to her question, yes, I think I know this road. I know something about it, but it’s been changed from what it was, I think. Hasn’t everything?

  We are slowing as we pass a stony lane, with the little grey house beyond the bare field of mud. Someone’s planted a few trees, must have been some time ago now, they’re tall, but weedy, not full grown, and the yard is still bare. The yard is still bare. It always was. That hasn’t changed.

  They’ve put a swing set near the field. A dog runs toward us down the lane barking. I know this place. I know it. My throat fills up with dread.

  THE HOUSE IS ALERT. The sun shines. The day is hot, for spring.

  Mother stays upstairs with Fannie in the room Fannie shares with Olive. Father goes to the barn after breakfast, a cold meal of sliced bread, fresh butter, and the soft white cheese that Fannie makes from the cow’s milk. Fannie herself heated and cooled and strained the milk to prepare this cheese she cannot eat, now. I scarcely swallow a bite. Cora and I carry the plates to the kitchen, cover the food. We stack the dishes in the sink but do not wash them, coming to silent agreement.

  Father does not come back.

  Cora and I pump water from the well, but it isn’t cool enough to cool Fannie’s fevered skin.

  I stumble from the yard into the house in a daze. I stop to sit at the table, and stare. I don’t climb the stairs to the bedroom where Fannie lies, thrashing and throwing off the bedclothes, crying out. I get up again to rip cloths with Cora and we place them in an enamel basin and pour water over top, and Olive staggers upstairs trying not to spill. She returns immediately. Mother has told her not to stay, not for one second. The danger is too near.

  Olive boils water in the kettle.

  Cora asks why? Why, when Fannie is so hot?

  Olive says she will make tea.

  Cora says, for who?

  Olive says, for the doctor. For George. For you, if you want a cup. For mother. For Edith if she thinks to come over and help. For anyone. For Father in the barn, you can carry him out a cup. For Aggie, look at her.

  I can’t see myself, but I see my hands laid out flat on the table before me, trembling, and I pull them into my lap and press them one on top of the other, changing back and forth, back and forth, trying to squeeze the fear out of them.

  Stop your arguing, says George. He sits slumped across the table from me. We look at each other silently, me and George, holding fast for a moment.

  Tea would be grand, he says, don’t you think, Aggie?

  I think I can hardly stand the noises coming from upstairs. The whole house is listening. The whole house is trying to keep Fannie breathing, to keep her wild rasps coming, the pauses between them growing ever greater. The fever has her and she is lost from herself. She is gasping out her sister’s name—Edith’s—and we are all pretending not to hear it. Mother’s voice rising smoothly against the tide of noise.

  I am only a child, but I know: I must never say what I know about Fannie. I must hold the terrible secret, because no one must ever, ever know. If Edith were to find out. If Father were to find out. Yet we hear it, over and over and over: Edith, I’m sorry, forgive me, Edith.

  She can’t know what she is saying. She’s that far gone. The words drift, slurred. A blur.

  Should we run for Edith, do you think? asks Cora.

  Edith can’t come here. She’s weak enough as it is. The flu would kill her, says Olive.

  George stands abruptly, shoving back his chair. Run for the doctor, he says. He is talking to me.

  What good would that do? Mother’s here, says Olive.

  We have to do something, says George. That’s my sister up there dying!

  Then you should go, says Cora. By horse would be faster.

  Aggie’s quick as a shot, says George. She can go through the backwoods. Go, he tells me. Run, Aggie, run.

  I feel the terror that has been pouring through my hands jerk back inside my body, suddenly useful and necessary. George is right. I’m quicker than a shot. I bang out the door and down the steps and around the back lane into the fields, my legs pumping like the pistons that power Father’s machine.

  The shortcut through the woods is narrow, a footpath rather than a lane or a road, and rarely used, not meant for horses. Tendrils of creeping vine cross it, and roots rise, and stones fresh from the earth. I am nimble and careful, my footsteps crisp, quick and light against the darkness of the woods, its shadows casting down on me like a spell I need to break. I’m coming to the far side, bursting from dark to light, from narrow to wide. I scarcely hesitate, passing from one to the other.

  The path gives onto a road that leads into town, and town is not far, not when you are running as fast as I am running.

  I can’t hear my thoughts over my breath coming harsh and regular. Running like this, this fast, this hard, fixes the strangest visions into my head. Glimpses become entire stories, full-blooded portraits. I see a groundhog waddle away from me, into the grass beside the road. I see a purple wildflower bend at my approach. I see the faces of three women standing on their front porch staring at me, their hair tucked beneath frilly caps, their mouths perplexed, their foreheads creased with disapproval. More houses, gone by in a rush. A stone in the road that etches the ball of my foot. A loose dog barking after me.

  I see the doctor’s son, who is my age and whom I know is named Peter after his father, playing in his yard with a ball. He is throwing the ball in the air and catching it in his hands.

  I see him turn at my approach. The ball drops from his hands to his bare feet. Mine are bare too. I see them as I reel to a stop before him, and stare down. Dusty skin of my own bare ankles, dirt crammed thickly between the toes. I gasp, “It’s Fannie. We need the doctor.”

&nb
sp; “He’s out,” says Peter.

  “But where?” I beg, blood rushing under my skin, flooding my skull, my hands on my knees, skirt swinging, bent over.

  Peter and I know each other from sharing a classroom at school, all the way through the grades. Peter says his father is tending to someone sick, and he knows who and where: in town, at the far edge. “I’ll take you,” he tells me, and instead of expressing thanks, I shout with impatience, “Well let’s go! Now! Hurry!”

  Peter’s mother has heard the commotion and she comes to the door. She doesn’t step all the way outside, and I can see a baby in her arms, one of Peter’s little sisters.

  “We’re going to find Father,” Peter tells her.

  His mother speaks sternly, or perhaps with fear. “Do not go inside that house. Do not go near it. Call for him from the street, do not knock or enter. Do you understand?”

  We nod.

  We run, and I am faster than Peter, which is no surprise. I’ve beaten every boy my age at running and throwing games. But I am glad to have him with me, not just to show me the way, which I could figure out for myself, but also because the burden of my message is lightened by his presence, by his willingness to join me. I slow my steps to give him the pretence of showing me the way. And in a way, he is. My breathing comes freer; I almost forget myself as I watch his bare feet just ahead of mine, beating down an easier path.

  Here we are, shouting from the yard. I see yellow quarantine papers hammered to the door, and the doctor coming out. He’s afraid, I see, because his son is here.

  “It’s Fannie,” I cry. “She’s, she’s . . .” But I can’t go on and say it. Peter keeps his distance, not just from the quarantined house, but from me. He is a step and then another gone from me.

  Here I am, alone again, carrying my message alone, dragging it behind me like a stone.

  Peter is watching me, the doctor is watching me, the lady passing in the street and her little boy are watching me, with pity. I have never before been aware of myself as a subject of pity, and I hate it so much that I might ignite.

  “I’ll come when I can,” says the doctor. “I’ve got my horse. I’ll be there within the hour.”

  And at that, I turn and run, banishing Peter altogether, although I hear him calling after me. What could he say that would change anything?

  I run like a hunted deer at the end of her race, my feet heavy and my legs weak, staggering with the effort. Nothing illuminates itself for me. All I see is the dusty street just ahead of where my feet slap down and rise up again. I enter the woods, and it is like stepping indoors on a brilliant day. Dimly, I see pulsing shadows, my eyes deceived by flickering sunlight, my toes catching as I trip on secret roots, my arms flying out to catch my fall. I stumble upright only to catch and fall again, again, running low to the ground in a crouch, bent over for protection.

  The nearer I come to our farm, the slower my footfalls, the more pronounced my bent-over agony. A cramp between ribs. A feeling growing inside me: if only I can delay arrival, Fannie will live on, that it’s my arrival and not her illness that will end her life.

  And I cannot, cannot go home.

  Instead, coming out of the woods, I veer away from the house and begin trailing around and around the back field, looping under the dark pines where fallen branches crunch and hurt my soles, curving down by the pond where little James drowned, and then behind the barn and away, out again toward the woods, past the woods, sliding under the pines, around by the pond, thinking again of James, to the barn where Father’s new windmill turns brightly, and out on the path that climbs toward the woods, veering past and under the shadowed pines.

  I will not stop.

  I run and run and run until I’ve lost count of the loops, until my hair is wet all through its heavy braid down my back, my dress soaked with sweat. The bones in my hips and knees and ankles ache with every footfall into the soft dirt and early weeds, and my breath comes raggedly, harsh in my throat, in loud gasps that alert my father, finally. I see him as I round the pond.

  Father is waiting for me to pass by the barn.

  I’ve stopped thinking about anything, and I’m surprised to see him there. I’m surprised to see anyone. I would run past him like he’s a tree or rock or weed, but he steps in front of me and catches me in his arms and I come to a sudden stop.

  I collapse onto his shoulder, my eyes and nose streaming, my throat choked with mucus, no longer a valiant messenger refusing to arrive, but an exhausted child of ten. A daughter. The youngest, the baby, the hoped-for son who never was.

  My father smells of wood shavings and rust. There is sawdust in his hair. I think that this is the closest I have ever been to him. It may be the closest I will ever be.

  “You’ll not be catching up to her, Aganetha. She’s gone ahead.”

  My sobs don’t sound like sobs at all, but like a struggle to breathe. I go limp in his arms. Father does not bring me to the house, where Fannie’s body is already cooling; perhaps he thinks this a kindness, or perhaps he is unprepared to go there himself. Instead, he carries me into the barn through the wide doors that roll open on oiled wheels so the farm wagon can drive up the grassy verge and onto the wide-planked open floor of the mow. My legs are long and trailing, bumping against his. He sets me down so that my feet meet the swept wide boards, and he waits for me to support my own weight, which I manage, heaving a shuddering cavernous sigh that drags me into myself.

  He climbs ahead of me up his stair steps and I follow. I can feel the muscles in my legs trembling with fatigue. We stand side by side on the level deck he has built, home to his completed invention.

  Wordlessly, Father shows me what he’s been working on: boards smoothed to silk, just that, just boards. They might have been for anything. But now they are not. Now they are for Fannie. I recoil from his offering.

  I see that we are speaking different languages, my father and I. Maybe we are saying the same thing, but it looks so different spelled out in the air between us that we can’t comfort each other.

  My throat aches, my mouth gummy and dry.

  “I’m going to the house,” I say hoarsely, and he nods his head, once, twice, and offers his focus to the plank he has been honing. I won’t consider how many times my father has undertaken this task, how many times he has done what he can to help his own child rest easy in death as in life. How proud he is of the smoothness of the boards he has worked. How it is all he can offer, now. I won’t let myself think of it, or try to understand.

  The sight of those boards fills me with raw terror.

  I come quietly through the summer kitchen. I pour a glass of water from the blue glass pitcher Mother keeps on the counter, and I drink the water down in great gulps, refilling the glass and drinking again. The sink is full of this morning’s dirty dishes. I can’t imagine ever caring enough to wash them clean. I stand over the sink and splash water on my face. Rivulets track down my arms, little streams rimmed with mud. I don’t see George anywhere about, and I am relieved, though I can’t think why. Only that I do not want to see him. I do not want to see anyone, except for Fannie.

  She will be upstairs.

  The house is so very quiet, as if everyone has gone to sleep in the middle of the day. I creep up the back stairs into the servants’ quarters, tiny rooms over the kitchen and dining room that our family doesn’t use, as we have no servants. My grandfather built this house with Father’s help, and I don’t think he kept servants or even a housemaid, so the rooms’ inclusion in the design make no sense, and yet the rooms exist. I walk the narrow, dimly lit hall and open the door that separates these cramped quarters from our own bedrooms, which are vast by comparison, and bright, the windows wide, the bumpy plaster splashed with whitewash.

  I hear the low voices of my sisters and my mother, and I follow their gentle pull. They hush as I come to the doorway and stop. At first, I can’t bring myself to look directly at Fannie, resting on her back in her bed. But then I can’t stop looking. Her eyes are clos
ed. I wonder if my mother has closed them, or is this how Fannie died? How does a person die? Is it like a window gone dark, shuttered? Does a person keep looking at this world until the very last second of life, trying to take it in and understand it at last, or simply to hold it, to attend to it, to love it? Or does a person stare in dreadful panic at all she is losing?

  I see that my mother is the only one who is touching Fannie. Olive and Cora stand at attention beside the window, shadows in the hot sunlight.

  “Don’t come near,” my mother says. “You must not get sick.” She is rinsing a cloth in a basin and she smoothes it over Fannie’s face, and around behind her ears, lifting her head with the hair flowing loose and damp all over the pillow so that she can wash the back of Fannie’s neck.

  “I went for the doctor,” I whisper because anything louder seems a disturbance.

  “Thank you, Aggie, but he’s been and gone. There was nothing he could do but hammer up the quarantine papers.”

  I am remembering something from my spent passage. I am remembering the white of hundreds of spring flowers, the spread of trilliums under the canopy of new leaves. Here it is, nearly June. Here is this terrifying flu that kills at random, stealing the healthiest, the most vigorous, as well as those who might be expected to succumb. Here is Fannie, aged twenty-three years, two months, and three days.

  I stand in the doorway, my sisters by the window, I don’t know for how long. For however long it takes to wash a body, and to dress it in clean underclothes and a fresh frock, and to brush and arrange its tangled hair, and to smooth its brow.

  And then a body is buried quickly, and deep, laid inside wood planed soft as silk.

  F.S. 1895–1918

  GEORGE SAYS I’m only half his sister, not his full, not like Fannie was.

  “Fannie is sister enough for me!” It has been two months since Fannie’s stone was laid in our graveyard, but I can’t bring myself to use the past tense.