A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [126]
In the silence that followed the conversation, she had turned away from the wall that held the phone and stared out the north window at the lilac bush in the middle of the yard. The tree was about to bloom and she could recall thinking, How strange it was that the tight, stiff skeletons of the previous year’s blossoms were still on the branch and that they had looked similar to those that were about to flower. The few remaining dead leaves had a dusty grey hue, as if they were not leaves at all but rather old bits of faded cloth left unprotected in an attic. She recalled the dust that had covered the plastic flowers, on the table, long ago, the last time she had seen Andrew. She recalled some of the words he had said: stop … this … can’t. How had she been able to walk past the memory of words such as these?
“A single phone call,” she told Jerome now, “and Andrew and I began to meet again after years of silence, even though as the great-great-grandson of the Timber Island empire he should have been aware that to do so was to attempt to bring the timber raft back to the island, to sail backwards and with great difficulty upstream.” She paused, her head to one side. “Were we wrong in our desire? I have no answer for that question. But once we began seeing each other again, I believe we both knew we would have to see it through that place where we would be carried separately back downstream so far apart we would be unable to wave, to shout.”
“Why?” asked Jerome, “ Why would it have to be like that?”
“Time,” said Sylvia. “Seven years had gone by. When I went to meet him at the cottage I came to realize that no one had been near the place for a long, long time. In the past, you see, the table would have been littered with papers covered by his handwriting and on the floor near the desk there would have been small, irregular towers of journals and books. There had been time. There had been change.”
“Yes,” said Jerome. “There would have been …”
“I was tremendously nervous and began to talk and talk. I told him about the museum, about how now that the last of the old families were leaving the County, we were receiving so many donations that we were likely going to have to rent warehouse space. As it was, the basement of the building was filling up with parasols and baby buggies and high button boots and silver tea sets and crochet work and coal oil lamps and strange pioneer tools: planers, clamps, lathes, all the things Gilderson’s ships would have brought into the County. He was looking at me closely as I spoke and I became self-conscious, unable to finish the sentences I was so earnestly beginning.
“ ‘This is what makes me happy,’ he said. This is making me happy.’
“I should have asked, What is making you happy? Us being here again together? The fact that I will be cataloguing objects? You not working? Looking into my face? But instead I turned away, began to gaze through the window at the struggle a tree seemed to be having with the wind. And he walked away, then turned back, and took my hand. Just the slightest pressure, the most casual touch—his sleeve brushing my arm as he passed me in the room—would cause a kind of sorrow to fall over me like rain, and then I would put my arms around him and everything in me would open.”
How silent Andrew had been during this reunion, though he had said her name while they were making love.
“He embraced me with such a sense of ease,” she said to Jerome, “such an air of familiarity that, in a way, time evaporated. Neither one of us said the word change, as people so often do in such situations. Change seemed to be irrelevant to us. What was relevant was the buried past, the dark painted hallways of the hotel under the dunes, the wrecks that littered the floor of the Great Lakes, what I had learned about the sagging timbers, the aged grey-coloured straw of the increasingly abandoned barns in my County. His ancestors. Mine.
“But in the months that followed, I should have