“He must think I’m such a jerk,” says Clemence.
“He doesn’t.”
“But he’ll think that Ilost it, or that Ikept it. That I’m just flaky.”
“Charles doesn’t think of you at all,” says Mrs. Yeung. “Here.” She places the tray of baking in Clemence’s hands, and it’s hard to balance with the book in her grip. “Go put these out. Happy tummies spend more money, and there’s still mountains of jumble to move.” She is pushing Clemence out the door, and where is Toby now? Perhaps he took his opportunity to escape, and she can’t blame him. The scene is overwhelming, and it only gets worse as she approaches the baking table, the crowds thick around it. She’s still got the book, got it stuck up under her arm, and she’ll have to think of a way to get it back to Charles. Setting down the tray, she darts away from the hungry masses, and it’s still so hot in here. Is it getting hotter? Her sweater is suffocating, and the brooch is weighing her down. How will she get the book back to Charles if his mother refuses to help? Clemence thinks of what else she’s taken from him, the shiny knives, all his wife’s clothing that she’s rifled through, and perhaps he thinks she’s a scavenger. The madwoman in the attic, indeed.
And then she hears her name and turns around, without even thinking, obviously, because if she’d stopped to think, she would not have turned. She would have taken off running, the way she’s been ever since she’d left him in the spring, away, away, but the flight is over now, the jig is up, and she might as well have gone nowhere at all because Toad looks the same, hurt and sad, possibly wearing the very shirt he’d been wearing the last time she’d laid eyes on him, though it’s hard to tell because Toad is the type of person who, if he likes something, buys fifteen of them. All of his clothes look the same. He is definitively not, however, the type of person who shows up at a jumble sale. He is also supposed to be on the other side of the continent.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“Ineeded to see you,” he says, coming so close. He takes her hand, and there it is, his touch, once so familiar to her that his was an extension of her own body. Once it was her home. She’d once loved that face. Had she loved that face?
But then she realizes that he’s not just holding her hand, he’s holding her still. This has always been the problem, and she pulls away from his grip. “I’m working here,” she tells him. “I’m busy. This isn’t the place—”
“It’s the only place where Iknew Iwould find you,” he says. “It’s all over your Facebook. Clemence, what’s happened? Have you lost your mind? Achurch jumble sale?” He’s not holding her now, and but she’s still stuck, because the room is packed, and the crowd has hemmed her in. “You won’t talk to me. You’ve given me no otherchoice. This isembarrassing.” He sounds pitiful. “We’ve got to work this out. Ideserve that much. Ido.” His voice is wavering. He sounds like he’s going to cry again.
She tells him, “No. Imean, you do. You really do. But Ican’t. Ijust can’t.” She doesn’t see how he doesn’t get it. She’d really thought that after doing what she’d done that there’d be no hope of salvage, that there’d be no pieces whole enough for any possibility of putting their world back together. She says, “You flew all the way here, though.” He’d never been one for dramatic gestures.
And he still isn’t, because he tells her, “Well, my dad’s sick. Cancer’s back.” He’d had a mass on his lung four years ago. It had been scary and awful, and Clemence had been looped in to all that; part of the family. She’d helped coordinate the meal train during his treatment. Remotely then, but she is even further away from all that now. She’d had no idea.
She says, “Istill can’t, though.” He’s not going to guilt her into this just because of his dad. She feels sweat running down her brow.
He asks, “Can’t what?” His eyes are locked on hers now, and he doesn’t need a grip. There is nowhere to run.
“‘Work this out,’” she says. “Ican’t do it, and I’ve tried to tell you. I’ve told you, in so many ways.” She closes her eyes now, the only way she can find the courage to tell him straight. “It’s over. We can’t go back to how it was, and Idon’t want to. Idon’t even think you really want to either, if you’re honest with yourself.”
And he is silent in response. She dares to open her eyes, even though she’s afraid she might have killed him withher brutal honesty, wondering if there is any way around this fact of having to hurt him like this over and over.
But Toad doesn’t look hurt, instead confused. He says, “Idon’t.”
“You don’t what?”
“Want to go back to how it was.”
“You don’t?”
“Clem, we’re done. Iknow we’re done. And Iwant itfinished. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He says, “I’ve met someone.”Minor Feelingsdrops to the floor. Then the most cutting barb: “Ithink you might be overestimating just how hard you are to get over.” His voice is fading, even though he’s still right there in her face. “To be honest, you’ve made it easy for me. Ishould probably thank you.”
Leaning down to pick the book up again, blood rushes to her head, and she begins to feel even more woozy. “Are you okay?” somebody’s asking, and is it Toby or is it Toad? And why are her sisters here, and Jillian and Naomi? All of Clemence’s people. Everybody’s mouths are moving, but the sounds don’t match, and why is the whole scene swimming? Toby looks uncomfortable, this is perhaps the sole aspect of the scene that makes any sense. And Mary-Ann Arbuckle is here, too, but she’s the size of a mountain, moving in and out of focus: “Ithink you might be overestimating just how hard you are to get over,” she is saying. And then all that Clemence can hear is the dull roar of the room in her ears, the sound of a seashell, or maybe it’s the sea. How is it possible to hear the sea from here? Could somebody maybe crack open a window? It’s so hot. And Mary-Ann Arbuckle is everywhere, growinglike Alice in the rabbit’s house, and the only thing that Clemence has to defend herself with is her brooch pin, and she’s not afraid to use it. The world going black for a moment, and she’s suddenly overwhelmed with the smell of books, that room beneath the stairs, everybody she’s known in her whole life gathered around her, but then reality snaps back, and Mary-Ann Arbuckle is all of it. Perspective skewed, so that when Clemence holds out her pin, it’s a sword after all, and so maybe she’s not so defenceless, but then everything goes dark, and this time it stays that way.
Twenty-Nine
Are you ever really home unless you’ve finally come home again, after a holiday, a convalescence, or why not both? When Clemence was here last, snow was merely suggestion, a decorative powder, but now it’s a blanket on the world, unrelenting, and so the scene is transformed. She barely knows this street, hardly recognizes the houses, all of it so much to take in after three weeks in her parents’ spare room, recovering. It turned out she’d been desperately sick—bacterial pneumonia. Spending five days in the hospital before her father arrived to take her back home to her parents’ place, and a part of her had wanted to fight it—she had her own home just a few blocks away. But she didn’t have the strength, and besides, there were so many stairs, and she was struggling to breathe at all. She couldn’t have managed. That she would ever feel better again seemed impossible, and how was it even supposed to happen with her simplylying there, waiting, but somehow it did, thanks to the wonders of antibiotics: Clemence started to recover. So that by Christmas, she was well enough to come downstairs and spend the day with her family, her sisters, and their partners, and their kids, but also had a convenient excuse to retreat from the chaos when the whole thing got to be too much.
And then by New Year’s, she was almost herself again, ringing in the hour with her parents, which perhaps was not the most auspicious start, but it was better than the New Year’s Eve the year before she’d spent fighting with Toad about the placement of the mirror in their downstairs bathroom. At least the home she had to return to now was her own, and she had missed it. She’d wondered if she would, if after the comforts of her parents’ house, finally come to see its deficiencies. The drafts, the cheap old windows whose glass frosted up in the cold, and that lumpy bed she’d convinced herself she’d become accustomed to, but now she wasn’t sure. What if the entire life she’d made had been a delusion, her perception of reality confused since her fever and subsequent hallucinations? She’d woken up in the hospital three days after the jumble sale, convinced that she’d stabbed Mary-Ann Arbuckle to death with a brooch pin, and everyone had had to tell her that Mary-Ann Arbuckle was completely fine.
But Clemence hasn’t dreamed it—the house is real, albeit transformed by winter. And there is Tom the handyman shovelling the steps. She had forgotten about Tom, but she’s grateful that he exists, because she’d been wary of slipping. She’s still not steady, and everywhere iscoated in ice, except where Tom has diligently chipped it away so Clemence can climb the steps safely. He greets her on the porch with the tip of his hat with the earflaps, and Clemence wonders is he’s fixed the leak in the hall yet. If Mrs. Yeung has brought him in to do over the place from top to bottom, but no, she sees, once they’ve come inside. Everything is the same. After all, it’s only been a few weeks, not even a month, but it seems like longer. So long that she is surprised to find it at all, the walls and door frames as solid as they ever were, albeit stained and haphazard. The mark from the leak unchanged, and the smell of the place—Mrs. Yeung’s Korean cooking melded with whatever everybody else has been cooking on their hot plates.
“What a beautiful old home,” says Bonnie Lathbury, who likes to see the good in things, and no doubt can even see that once upon a time, her statement had probably been true. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, she’s examining the newel post, the sole remnant of any original woodwork, never mind the crummy carpet, the holes in the plaster. She’s carrying bags of groceries, and Roger has more: fresh fruit and vegetables. They’re convinced that Clemence wasn’t taking care of herself, and Bonnie’s concerned that the problem had been mould. Both of them uncertain about delivering her back here, reminding her over and over again that she is welcome to stay with them as long as she needs to. Forever. Bribing her with home-cooked meals and freshly changed linens, but they would tire of this eventually, Clemence knows. She would tire even sooner.
And believe it or not, Clemence actually wants to return here, to this strange house in the middle of the city, a house that seems, at first glance, thoroughly devoid of charm. She is happy to be climbing these two steep staircases, just as airless as they were in the heat of the summer, and she turns to tell her parents, “It’s not much farther now.” They’re laden with the groceries, and haven’t permitted her to carry a thing, which was probably wise, because she’s more winded than usual on the way up.
It’s remarkable how much this feels like a homecoming, unlocking that door with her very own key, even though most of the room’s furnishings used to be someone else’s. Everything exactly where she’d left it, right down to the plate by the sink from the toast she’d had the morning of the jumble sale, still scattered with crumbs. She doesn’t even need to turn the lights on, because with all the leaves off the trees, her room is brighter than ever, the cushions on her daybed carefully arranged, which is the sole reminder that Jillian had been here, popping in while Clemence was in the hospital to gather clothes and personal items. Everyone had been concerned for Clemence that day, except for Clemence herself, whose mind was far away.
“It’s actually kind of lovely,” Bonnie is saying, as Clemence could have predicted, but there is surprise in her voice that she doesn’t have to lie or embellish. The gingham curtain beneath the sink, behind which Clemence keeps her tea in a tin, and other canned goods.
She tells her parents, “I’ll put the kettle on,” and she is prouder of this, of having them here, than she’d everbeen when showing them around the beautiful two-thousand-square-foot townhome that she’d shared with Toad, which had always seemed more like a step on the property ladder than an actual place for people to live.
