Refuge Read online

  She felt an ache in her belly, flesh separating from bone. When she found blood on her underwear, she was certain it was the end. For a time, she felt almost light-hearted, but then the spotting stopped and she grew ravenous. She ate without thinking, buying apples from vendors that suddenly, that fall, appeared on every New York street corner. She stuffed her mouth with crusts of bread and cold leftover potatoes, the last scrapings of custard from patients’ trays, until her uniform stretched immodestly over her breasts and hips, and she had to buy another from a buxom nurse who was leaving to care for an ailing aunt in Indiana.

  She could no longer avoid the truth, although she couldn’t yet fully grasp it either.

  She willed the foetus gone, put herself to sleep with dreams of drowning cats and stillborn calves. Each time the vision came to her of Carlos, his arms spread wide, she clenched her fists so hard her nails bit into her skin. Once, in the middle of the night, after hours of pointless weeping, she drank as much castor oil as she could stomach and climbed onto the table, jumping down so heavily and so often that the man in the room below banged on his ceiling with a broom.

  There were doctors at the hospital. Instruments. She handled a scraper, considering, then set it back in place. She let opportunities pass, refused to decide one way or the other, although she thought about it constantly, her father’s words a silent refrain.

  Left to itself, nature will take its own rightful course.

  On the day she first felt the child move, she packed her morbid thoughts away with her earth-coloured skirts and heavy stone necklace, her pictures, and the travelling camera Carlos had given her. She tied the box with a stout cord knotted twice and shoved it deep under her bed. In those nights when she couldn’t sleep, nights filled with weeping for the uncertainty of it all, she would fling her arm out from the covers and reach down to the rough box, finding a vague kind of comfort in knowing that the young woman she had once been was still there.

  Sometimes she soothed herself with memories of Carlos knocking at her door, his arms heaped with roses, his voice rising through her window, Currucu, currucu. But as her body changed, something shifted. She found it harder to call up his face, his fiery hair, his hands, the memory of him fading like a photograph improperly fixed. It wasn’t just him. Everything about her time in Mexico was dissolving, the details disintegrating until it seemed impossible that she had travelled on a train to the farthest reaches of the continent, lived in a pink palace, fallen in love with a man with fawn-coloured skin. One day in the bath, looking down at the mound of her belly, she realized she didn’t want to be found, she couldn’t imagine going back, she wasn’t that woman anymore.

  She unstitched the pleats in her uniform and let her hair grow long to offset the new fullness of her face. She complained to the other nurses about the weight she was gaining, all that rich cheesecake and smoked meat. She thought she would be able to work until late in the winter, maybe close to the birth, but by the time the first snow was falling, her secret was found out.

  “You’re a good nurse, O’Brien,” the supervisor said when she let her go the week before Christmas. “Place the baby for adoption, then come back and see me. We’ll consider this a sick leave.”

  ~

  The winter came in colder and darker than she remembered a winter could be.

  She contacted the doctors she’d worked for at Willard Parker. One or two took pity on her situation and recommended her for private duty nursing in the neighbourhood, caring for a girl with rubella, a boy with chicken pox, a woman with a septic womb. Each assignment led to the next like a trail of breadcrumbs through the streets and lanes of the gastown and sometimes into the better neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. The artists and Communists there didn’t mind being cared for by a pregnant woman, although she was paid less often in dollars and cents than in paintings and sketches that she tacked to the walls of her room: bright sunflowers, sultry women laid out on couches, the homeless and the hopeless hunched in dark sweeps of charcoal.

  The Stock Exchange crash had no effect on her meagre savings, safe in their coffee canister, but something changed. People grew fearful, tight with their money. Faces seemed to lengthen, the corners of their mouths drawn down, their eyebrows levelled. It wasn’t dejection or despair so much as an epidemic of sadness, as if people expected to suffer and had resigned themselves to whatever was coming their way.

  She refused to give in to the prevailing mood. She left her room every morning and walked briskly through the streets of Manhattan, sometimes to see a patient, more often to see the city, to lose herself in it. One afternoon in late January, when the wind died down and the sun was out, she made her way north on Fifth all the way to 34th, where she came upon a hole in the ground as big as the zócalo.

  “What’s going on?” she asked one of the workers wheeling a barrow toward the gap.

  “Where you been? This is going to be the tallest building in the world!”

  All through the winter of 1930, the hole deepened. On one side of the block, the old Waldorf Astoria was being torn down, people scavenging bits of ironwork and stained glass, a brick, a key, a swag of drapery. The grand hotel was not yet fully demolished, and already the excavation for the new Empire State Building was underway.

  The audacious scale of the project buoyed her, as did the reckless pace of construction: two shifts of three hundred men hacked through rock night and day to make the foundation. After she discovered that the plans were unveiled on August 29, 1929, the same Thursday she fled Mexico City, she made a point of walking to the intersection of 34th and Fifth on that day each week, standing in the snow or in the frigid sunshine, measuring its progress against her own.

  By early March, when her baby was thrusting out so far she could no longer button her coat, the scaffolding was lifting into the air. Crowds thickened on the sidewalk, people standing three and four abreast to stare up at walls that seemed to grow right before their eyes.

  The building rose at astonishing speed, three or four storeys a week, sometimes one whole floor in a day. She’d lean against the wall of the bank across the street and watch as the beams, still warm from the furnaces in Pittsburgh, were craned up to the latest height, workmen tossing rivets like small glowing planets across vast empty spaces as they fixed the struts in place. For hours, she would stand against the cold concrete, bundled in her cloth coat and Mexican shawl, her head thrown back as she watched men stroll across the sky on nothing more than a silver thread.

  They made her own high-wire act seem like child’s play.

  ~

  She was on her way through Union Square, just finishing her rounds of patients, artists holed up in the lofts of Gramercy Park and Greenwich Village, when she heard her name.

  “MacCallum! Is that you?” A tall, bony woman was leaning out of a second-storey window, one arm waving. “It is you! My god, I’d recognize that forehead anywhere. It’s Helen, you dolt. Helen Klassen, your old nursing pal. The girl you stood up six years ago.”

  It was the laugh she recognized: like a burro braying.

  “Helen, it is you!” she said when her friend burst onto the sidewalk. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Not looking for you, that’s for damn sure. I thought you’d disappeared into thin air.”

  Her cheeks reddened. “I live here. In New York City. East Fifth and Second Avenue.”

  “And I live here. We’re practically neighbours!” Helen exclaimed.

  “But what about Chihuahua? Your parents. The Mennonites.”

  “Good Lord, I bolted first chance I got. You were going to be my saviour, and when you didn’t show up, I had to rescue myself. I love my family, but I can only take so much of that desert righteousness. ‘Christ will provide,’ that’s what my father never tired of saying. My mother never said anything at all. They’re still there, waiting for rain or death, whichever comes first. I decided to come to New York
City to make my fortune as a painter. I take classes at the Art Students League, write a little for the broadsides. How about you?”

  “I got a job in Mexico City. Nursing. In a Red Cross hospital at first, then private duty. I kept thinking I would get out to see you, but then I moved up here, to work at Willard Parker.” Even to her, the explanation sounded thin, her silence inexcusable. “I did write, though. I sent a postcard. At Christmas.”

  “I was long gone by then.” Helen raised an eyebrow at the bulge of her belly. “And who’s the happy father?”

  Only Helen could have made her cry.

  Helen pulled a handkerchief from her bag. “Here, plug those waterworks, kiddo. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  But she did. Every day she’d end her rounds at the old brownstone where Helen had a large room with a bay window and canvases leaning against the walls, half a dozen thick. She told Helen about Don Arturo and the pink-walled mansion; about the Cruz Roja and the patients who made her feel needed and wanted, exactly the way nursing school had promised.

  “You almost make me wish I’d stuck around to be capped.”

  “Really?”

  Helen laughed. “That was a joke, MacCallum. The only thing I regret is not being able to get a decent job, but then again, if I had a job, I wouldn’t be painting, and Lord knows the world needs another bad painter.”

  All through the first hours of their reunion, sitting at a table in a tavern where everyone knew Helen, she expected her friend’s eyes to grow brittle, her lips to tighten. But the accusations never came. Not on that afternoon and not on any of the afternoons they spent together. Even when she ventured into a lull in the conversation with, “Look, I’m awfully sorry. I meant to come to Chihuahua, really, I did,” Helen only waved her off, saying, “That was then, this is now.”

  When Helen came around to tell her that a spot had come up in her rooming house, a bigger and cheaper room than the one she was in, she packed up her valise, pulled the stoutly tied box out from under the bed, and loaded it onto a child’s wagon she’d found, together with the sheaf of paintings and sketches that papered her room.

  Living next to Helen changed everything. On nights when she arrived home from her rounds, footsore and heart-weary, her friend would bring her creamed codfish on toast or liver fried with bacon. After her solitary winter, she would have welcomed any company, but Helen always made her smile. Her friend read to her from the funny papers she dug out of the trash baskets along Fifth Avenue. She taught her how to play cards: silly childish games at first, like Old Maid, Happy Families, and Lost Heir; later, rummy and gin, the two of them betting with burnt matchsticks that Helen saved in a jar as she lit her cigarettes. On warm nights, they’d go up to the roof. She’d hoist her bulk up the fire escape, Helen following behind, hands pressed against her back, “Just in case,” she’d say, and they’d play cards by the glow of the city, eating apples that Helen pared and cut in thin slices, arranging them in designs across the plate.

  “How does a Mennonite know so many card games?”

  “Part of my escape plan,” she laughed. “It came with the kit, How to Appear Normal in the Outside World.”

  When they laughed, it filled the sky.

  On the night the pains started low in her belly, it was Helen she called out for, and together, in that old brownstone, they brought him into the world.

  “What are you going to call him?” Helen asked, handing her the baby.

  She looked at him for so long that by the time she spoke, Helen had left and she was alone.

  “Charles Alexander,” she said to the child. “After my father. And yours.”

  He was beautiful. Blond curls and eyes that shone the deepest blue. His skin was as pale as hers, not a hint of the fawn she had stroked with such love. For a moment, she was disappointed; then he turned toward her, nuzzling, and she lifted her breast to his cheek, teasing his upper lip with her nipple. He took it in his mouth and sucked. She laughed, a sharp intake. They quickly settled into a rhythm, and before she knew it, she was humming, a soft murmur between the two of them, the boarding house room, New York City, Mexico, the whole world, even Helen, falling away like a chrysalis.

  The baby slept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. She spent the first few weeks sitting on the floor beside him, charting the squints and grimaces that flitted across his face. There were no tears — the world had not yet given him reason to weep — although now and then one of his frowns would blossom into a screaming-fit and his eyes would press shut, his mouth drawn up in a square that collapsed just as quickly into a vague sort of a grin. She often wondered, in those early weeks as she watched the blank slate of his face crumple into distressed, displeased expressions, whether the lifetime habit of frowning, that default to an unhappy face that she had observed first in May and later in so many of her patients, began here, at birth. Whether happiness was a skill to be learned.

  But then a smile would appear out of nowhere, or a look of sweet surprise, of unadulterated interest, and she’d think, No, my father was right.

  Wide-eyed and open-hearted, that’s how we enter the world; it’s what we experience that closes our minds.

  The day has got away from me. Already the trees are reaching their shadows into the verandah, scrabbling up the walls.

  “I’d like to show Nang Aung Myaing around the farm,” Sean says. “Okay with you?”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “She could stay over.” His eyes — at the best of times, too big for his face — are wide as stethoscopes. He’s leaning his lanky body forward, not pleading exactly, but something close. I should have chased him back to the farmhouse the minute I heard his interfering voice outside my window.

  “Not here, she can’t. There’s no room.”

  “I bring hammock,” she says from the doorway.

  “My parents are away until July on their buying trip. The farmhouse is empty except for me. I’d like the company.”

  Why on earth did I ever reply to that email? All I want is for my life, such as it is, to carry on to its end, without disruption, my ghosts quietly in their place instead of stirred up the way they are, hauling me back to pasts I’d rather forget.

  The two of them stand there gaping at me. Even the restrained, inexpressive Nang has a bit of warmth to her now. They don’t touch, not a stray finger grazing an arm or a lock of hair brushing the other’s shoulder, but I can feel the connection between them, a thin, taut tendon that thickens by the second.

  I want her away from me.

  “Go on, then. Leave me in peace. Come back in the morning. And not too late. Nang and I have business to attend to so she can get back on that bus.”

  The Second Day

  “Don’t be mad,” Sean says, bursting into the kitchen. “I know we’re late. I made Nang Aung Myaing noodles for breakfast. She hasn’t had mohinga for ages. I had to make some substitutions, and it took forever, but it wasn’t bad. Was it?”

  He nudges the girl and she smiles up at him. Sean is six-foot-three, at least. If the girl hits five feet, I’d be surprised. He hunches over and she strains upward, both of them intent on closing the gap.

  “Not a good idea to make an old woman wait. You never know if she’ll still be here when you finally show up.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “I certainly am, and I learned a long time ago to do exactly what I said I was going to do.”

  I am sitting at the table looking queenly, I think, in my long skirts and blue Mexican rebozo, a flash of silver at my wrist. The truth is, I was grateful for the extra time. It gave me a chance to clear a decent space at the table and settle myself properly, facing the door. An empty chair at my side; another across from me. It doesn’t sound like much, but at the pace I move, making these arrangements took up most of the morning.

  “I’ve been on the phone.” Sean is breathle
ss, as if he’s talked all the air out of his lungs. “One of the women in the orchestra, her husband works for Immigration. He was great, set us straight on a few things.”

  Us.

  “Sit down, Sean.” I pat the chair beside me. The girl takes the only seat left, on the opposite side of the table. She has abandoned her jeans and T-shirt for something more ethnic: a long, narrow skirt in a patterned, silky fabric, a band of darker silk wrapped around her skinny torso, and over that, a soft black jacket with coloured ribbons trailing from armbands of silver coins. She’s wound a length of red cloth around her head, the tail of fabric hanging down her back like a veil.

  Beautiful.

  But I’m not fooled. Bryan and Cathy sell getups like this at the Fiesta! bazaar they hold at the farm every fall, a variation on the Fiesta Mexicana! Carlos and I started a million years ago to keep bread on the table. We hired Bryan to do the heavy lifting; he was just a kid then, younger than Sean. Now he owns the farm, all but the island and a strip of land from the dock to the road to give me access.

  Sean fidgets beside me. His body is in an ongoing tug-of-war with his clothes, which always look on the verge of escaping victorious, his jacket falling off one shoulder, his pants slipping so low on his hips I sometimes wonder how he can walk.

  “Are you going to tell me what your Immigration friend had to say?”

  “Sure. It’s like this. Anybody can immigrate into Canada if they have a job to come to. If they’re a refugee like Nang Aung Myaing, they have three options.” He counts them off on his sinewy musician fingers. “They can be referred by the United Nations or some other agency. They can apply for refugee status once they’ve landed here. Or they can apply from outside the country. But that’s crazy. When Nang Aung Myaing was in the refugee camp in Thailand, the closest city she could apply from was New Delhi, more than three thousand kilometres away. And even if she could get there to apply, the wait time was three, four years. Applying from inside Canada is faster, but a lot stricter. She already applied in Vancouver and was denied.”