Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“I thought he was back. It was supposed to be a joke.”

“A joke,” says Maggie flatly.

“I thought he was hiding from me,” the girl whispers. “I thought he was here with his wife.” Her face screws up into a mask of hatred. “He’s such an asshole!”

Maggie doesn’t know what to say. “Your father told me you’d gone to Toronto.”

“My father’s a moron.” Lydia wipes the tears from her cheeks and stares across the lawn with glistening eyes. “I moved back after Halloween.”

“So he was lying. Did he tell you that I’d called?”

“Yeah. I promised him I wouldn’t do it again.” Suddenly Lydia has taken on the contemptuous air that she shared with her cousin in the summer. “Mom’s right, he’s spineless. He’d let me get away with anything.”

Maggie thinks back to her phone call with the man and wonders whether he’d have covered for his daughter if he knew what she had written. A joke, she claimed. Dimitri’s idea. How could they have been so stupid?

“You wrote such hateful things,” Maggie says.

The girl starts crying again, while Maggie remains motionless beside her.

“He just wanted to stir things up,” says Lydia. “He wanted to rile your boyfriend.” She turns to Maggie with desperate eyes. “He’s messed up in the head. He’s a junkie.”

“That didn’t bother you?” Maggie wonders whether Dimitri told Lydia or she found out some other way.

The girl’s shoulders droop and she puts her head in her hands. “I guess I was in love with him.”

Maggie doesn’t offer any consolation. She isn’t going to let herself feel sorry for this person, not after what she wrote. It doesn’t matter how young or infatuated she is.

Eventually Lydia looks up with resignation. “If you’re going to call the cops on me, you should do it now. Otherwise I’m leaving on a bus tonight.” As if to underscore the point, she stands and makes her way to the bottom of the stairs. “Jacqui and I are meeting in Toronto. We’re moving to Los Angeles to live with her dad.” Then she adds, “It isn’t to get out of trouble for what I wrote. We’ve been planning it forever.”

Maggie doesn’t believe her for a minute. It’s a silly schoolgirl fantasy.

“Have you told your father?” she asks.

Lydia glowers into the distance. “He doesn’t care. He wouldn’t even try to stop me.”

Maggie feels an impulse to march the girl next door and make her tell her father everything. It isn’t her job to fix things between the two of them, though. It isn’t her job to make sure Lydia turns out all right. Better for the girl to go to California than stay here and force Maggie to keep dealing with her.

“You do what you want,” Maggie tells her. “I’m not going to call the cops.”

Instead of being relieved, the girl looks disappointed. “Why not? After what I wrote, I should be in jail.”

“Sorry, I guess you’ll just have to live with it.” She can hear George Ray saying how she never wants a fuss. But right now Lydia’s practically daring her to make one, and she refuses to give her the satisfaction.

The girl’s glower intensifies. She starts down the driveway, then stops. “This is your last chance,” she says.

“Go. You’re home free.”

“You’re being an idiot.” Lydia sounds almost frantic. “You can’t let people get away with things.”

“Travel safely,” says Maggie. “I hope you have a good life.”

The girl’s eyes sweep across the house. “I’m glad he sold it,” she declares. “I hated living here.”

The pronouncement seems to free her, and she starts skipping down the drive as though without a care. Halfway along, she stops once more.

“I really am sorry,” she calls out. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

Maggie nods, worrying the gesture could be taken for a sign of forgiveness. She holds tight to the house key, feeling its tacky weight on her damp skin.

Once the girl has gone, Maggie’s first thought is to phone George Ray and tell him what has happened. Instead, she goes upstairs and peeks into Brid’s room. Sleeping, after all. Maggie tiptoes to the bed and strokes her hair. It would be good to film her as she lies there so tranquilly, but lately Maggie hasn’t had much desire to use the camera.

Brid stirs under her hand, opens her eyes, then lets them fall closed again. “Hey,” she says sleepily. “I love you.”

Maggie starts at the words. Does Brid know to whom she’s spoken? Already she has returned to sleep, so there’s no way to ask. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Fletcher used to tell Maggie all the time that he loved her, and look where he is now. George Ray never said anything about love, nor Maggie to him, even though on more than one occasion the words were on her tongue. Then she thinks of Lydia saying she was in love with Dimitri. A stupid teenage crush, maybe, but Maggie isn’t about to deny that it was some kind of love. She gazes down at Brid and wonders at such variety.

“I love you, too,” she says, continuing to stroke her hair, as if it’s only through the stroking that either of them might find any peace.

The next day, when she arrives at Niagara Falls, there are plenty of places to park. It isn’t a surprise, for who besides her would think to visit the place on a frigid weekday morning in the middle of December? Only a few other souls stroll the promenade beside the falls. Sitting on a bench with the Super 8 camera in its case beside her, she watches a pair of teenagers walk past, the boy a few yards ahead, the girl dragging her feet, her swollen belly impossible to hide. They don’t even bother to look at the waterfall. When the girl catches Maggie staring at them, she gazes back scornfully, and Maggie realizes how abject she must appear, sitting there without even a companion. She wonders if George Ray has ever seen Niagara Falls, and she regrets never bringing him here.

Once the teenagers have passed out of sight, Maggie goes to the railing above the falls. Lifting the camera from its case, she switches it on and zooms in until the frame is filled with cascading water. She tries to imagine how it will look projected on the wall, whiteness tumbling down whiteness, the whole thing silent because she left the tape recorder at home. Mist starts to collect on the lens. She remembers how, after her father brought her here as a girl, she had dreams where she was in the river being swept toward the brink. They always ended just before she reached the edge.

On the drive home, she has turned off the highway onto the gravel road when the first snowflakes of the year begin to settle on the windshield, big fat ones swirling through the air and smearing the glass. It takes a moment before she realizes they’re not snow at all; they’re ash. Ahead of her, a long pillar of smoke rises toward the clouds. It must be someone burning brush. Only after she has passed Frank Dodd’s driveway and arrived at her own does she realize the smoke is coming from the farmhouse.

The source of the plume is a second-storey window. Brid’s room. Occasionally a flame flicks its tongue through the broken glass. Otherwise the house has a strange normalcy about it. As Maggie parks the van and starts up the porch stairs, she could almost believe everything is fine.

She’s pretty sure that most people would tell her not to walk into a burning house, but it turns out to be a very easy thing to do. The knob of the front door isn’t even warm. There’s only a thin stream of smoke trickling down the stairs, pretty and harmless. The sounds from the second floor are of a large campfire before it has died down enough for marshmallows. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, she calls Brid’s name and hears nothing. There’s no one in the living room, just the day’s newspaper spread out on the coffee table. She’s almost tempted to go and straighten it. No one is in the kitchen. Then she hears a meowing from the mud room and finds Elliot clamouring to be let out. It’s odd to share none of his panic. She opens the door for him, and when he lopes away to safety, she wonders whether she can now be credited with having saved a life, whether sometimes it’s that simple and ordinary.