Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“If we cut down some trees, I could see right to the wrecker’s wall,” Brid says. “Then I could keep a lookout from here.”

“Don’t you want to come downstairs?” Maggie asks. “Have you had lunch?” Brid gestures to a plate on the windowsill littered with bread crumbs, but Maggie knows it’s been there since last night.

“I like it better up here,” says Brid. “It’s safer.”

Ten days ago Maggie would have asked what was so unsafe about downstairs. Since Brid’s arrival she sees things like the gas oven and bottles of bleach in a different light.

“You wouldn’t have to worry,” she says. “I’d stay with you.”

“Babysitting, huh?”

“Don’t be silly.” The truth is she’ll end up watching over Brid wherever she is, and there’s no pleasure in the idea of lurking by the bedroom door. “Hey, why don’t we watch the Super 8 film? I haven’t seen it since—well, since the party.”

Brid gives her a disdainful look. She’s right, it’s idiotic to suggest such a thing. Why would Brid want to revisit that time, with all those shots of Wale and Pauline? But then Brid changes her mind and says a screening would be a good idea. She starts out of the room trailing her sleeping bag while Maggie tries to guess what has fired her enthusiasm. Some spurt of masochism, perhaps. Following her into the playroom, Maggie finds her already sprawled across the floor and staring at the wall. Maggie sets up the projector, settles on a chair beside it, and starts it running.

The first image to greet them is one imprinted on her mind from dozens of viewings: the camper van passing down the highway. Then there’s a shot of Fletcher talking behind the wheel with the sunlight flashing in his glasses. After the encounter at the funeral, it’s a surprise to see him with his moustache and long hair restored, looking like a dime-store disguise. Maybe the clean-shaven version of him at the funeral was the real one all along. She imagines him flirting with a secretary in his office at Morgan Sugar, offering to take her for a spin in his Bentley. He always claimed to love the camper van, yet when he finally admitted he wasn’t coming back, he relinquished it to Maggie with a surprising indifference, as if she and the vehicle were to be discarded together.

Next begins the sequence of Pauline leading the tour of the farmhouse. During summer screenings of this reel, Maggie focused on taking in the rooms’ appearance, totting up the improvements made to them. This time her attention’s drawn to the girl, who cavorts through the frame with a painful innocence. Maggie glances at Brid.

“It’s okay,” Brid says, her gaze fixed on the screen. “I can handle it.” But her face is wretched.

From that point on, Maggie watches each scene imagining how Brid must see it. There’s Pauline playing with Fletcher in the barracks, then the breakfast after Wale’s arrival, with all Brid’s eagerness to please him on display. Until now, watching this sequence, Maggie has only ever thought of Brid as pestering, but there she is making everyone a meal with neither help nor gratitude.

Beside her, Brid is crying. “I was such a bitch,” she whispers. Maggie moves to turn off the projector, but Brid tells her not to stop it. “I can take it, really. Come here, will you?” She unzips the sleeping bag and opens the flap as if turning a page. Maggie sits down next to her, and Brid puts an arm around her waist.

With amazing precision, the film matches Maggie’s memories from the summer, not just in terms of what she remembers but in the way she recalls it. There are the same jump-cuts and freeze-frames, the same lack of depth and texture. It’s as if the contents of her brain have been assembled by her former self while she bent over the editing machine.

Before she’s conscious of what has happened, they’ve reached the crucial scene in the final reel. A second later, just as she expects the appearance of Fletcher naked in the bedroom, she’s plunged into a shot of the baseball game. It’s what he told her he’d done, yet it’s still astonishing.

Then she remembers the final, added clip about to greet them.

“We can stop it here,” she says, hurrying to turn off the projector.

“Yeah,” says Brid. “I don’t know if I could handle that bit with Pauline and the dead birds.”

Maggie can’t believe what she’s hearing. “You’ve watched it?”

“At Fletcher’s last month,” says Brid, seeming unperturbed. “He had some friends over to screen the whole thing. You know, for laughs.”

Immediately she can picture it: Fletcher in his parents’ recreation room with his fraternity pals and Brid, maybe a few Boston debutantes thrown in for good measure, all of them in hysterics from his stories about that crazy chick and her camera, nobody mentioning his own attempt at filmmaking. Maggie slumps across the sleeping bag and lies on her stomach with the floor hard against her cheek.

“He never really cared about this place, did he?” she says. “Or about me. He just wanted to get away from his dad.”

“He did care,” says Brid. “He was all broke up after the news about the baby.”

Maggie hears this and can’t suppress her irritation. “Why does everyone say it like that? There was no baby.”

“Oh.” Brid seems doubtful. “Well, Fletcher thinks there was.” Brid sees her confusion and adds, “He figured you had an abortion.”

Maggie lifts her head, then lets it fall, the veins in her temples throbbing. “How could he think that?” It seems impossible. “I explained to him what happened.”

“You were so sure you were pregnant, and then suddenly you weren’t,” says Brid.

Maggie scrambles to reconfigure October in her memory. She only ever worried about him thinking she’d faked it.

“He wasn’t ever going to come back, was he?” she says. “Even if there was a baby.” It’s something she realized long ago, but still a gloom falls on her. She remembers the doctor’s consultation room, the news of the test result, and the man’s pity along with his disbelief. “At first the doctor thought I’d had an abortion too.” She winces at the recollection. “I stopped smoking, took vitamins …”

“Of course, honey. Nobody’s blaming you.”

“I never really wanted to be a mother,” Maggie finds herself saying. “Didn’t know the first thing about raising a child—” Abruptly she realizes how these words might be heard by Brid, and to change the subject she asks, “Did you think I got rid of it?”

“Oh sure,” Brid replies. “But I thought you did it because it was Wale’s.” She speaks in a breezy way, as if there’s nothing at stake in what she’s saying.

“How could you think that?” exclaims Maggie.

“Look at the movie.” Brid points to the blank wall. “The bastard’s always watching you. You seem pretty keen on him, too, the way the camera stays on his face.”

Maggie sits up and tries not to look away from Brid as she speaks. “Honestly, there was nothing.” There’s a temptation to say more, but they’ve reached dangerous territory and she needs to get them onto something else. Still, to her horror, she hears herself ask, “Have you heard from him?”

“Not once since he left.” Brid’s face grows suspicious.

“Why, have you?”

Maggie shakes her head and Brid’s attention drifts away. When it returns, there’s a plaintive note in her voice. “He liked this place, you know. He was always saying good things about it. About you, too.”

Maggie feels her face go red. “I never heard him say anything nice. He only ever made fun of the farm—and of me.”

“That’s Wale. He finds something he likes, he kicks the tires a lot.” Brid smirks in a way that seems to hurt her. “I tried not to be jealous. I was glad, really. Figured he might stay around longer because of you. So much for that, huh?”