A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [133]
“But still I waited, as I had always waited. I sat on the chair with the torn rush seat and remembered our clothing tossed there by arms much younger than the ones that lay, useless, in my lap. I ran the ancestral stories over and over in my mind. And then I saw Annabelle’s scrapbook lying beside two green leather journals on the table. I opened the velvet cover and read the captions Annabelle had written to describe the fragments she had pasted in it. A piece of parchment from a map of the bogs, lace from the collar of the first good dress Marie had been given as a child, a ticket to the Louvre museum found in Branwell’s desk drawer, the last rose of summer 1899, that fateful match that had lit Gilderson’s pipe, lake-bleached splinters stolen from the hull of several timber carriers, bark from the recently felled cedar tree the men always erected in the middle of a raft for good luck, the sole of a shoe washed up at Wreck Bay—probably belonging to a drowned sailor—and still he did not come. Yes, these were the things I looked at while the knowledge of his permanent absence grew in me, and the light in the cottage grew darker, and the light in the sky grew dimmer.
“I closed the scrapbook and slipped it into the bag I had brought with me. Then I opened one of the journals and saw his handwriting. It was the ink on the page that made me want to take them with me, that last trace of his moving hand. Outside, the storm had moved to another part of the province, or had sailed over the lake to the country on the other side. The air had cleared and there was still a trace of a red sunset in the western sky, though not a whisper of it on the grey winter lake. As it had the first time that I had climbed that hill so many years before, deep snow slipped over the tops of my boots and scalded my legs as I walked toward the car. The storm had left a piercing wind in its wake and the newly fallen snow was beginning to arrange itself into a series of drifts. My footprints couldn’t have lasted longer than a half-hour. Had Andrew come the following day there would be nothing to tell him about my approach, my retreat. But I knew he would never again walk through the orchard, enter the cottage, light the stove. I knew he was gone.”
For the first time, Sylvia rose from her chair and began to walk back and forth across the room as she spoke. Jerome watched her move from place to place. “How might we have appeared, I wonder, to someone observing us from off stage: a man, a woman, alone together in a broken-down cottage?” There would be the glances, smiles, the long silences, and the sessions of speech that would pass between them, the unconscious gestures: he leaning toward her, she touching his wrist, placing her hand on the side of his face. They would curl together on the bed, for hours at a time, sleeping. They would often touch, sometimes casually, sometimes passionately. They would approach each other, withdraw, and eventually separate, permitting concession roads, fields of grain, entire townships, a body of water to come between them. Strings of migrating birds would emerge, like dark sentences, in the sky, as the season changed, the years passed, and the lake altered under varying degrees of light. And finally, finally, they would forget; forget, or be themselves forgotten.
By now Sylvia was standing in the part of the room where Mira so often worked on her performance pieces. There was still a small amount of sand on the floor, and each time she stepped forward or back it crunched softly under her feet.
“I often ask myself what river, what lake or stream the ice came from. I am for some reason anxious for this piece of the puzzle though it makes, I know, absolutely no difference