The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [105]
It is now: I am the only survivor.
In any case, it was just as Reenie had said, about the men in movie theatres, except that what I felt was not outrage. But the rest of it was true enough: I was transfixed, I could not move, I had no recourse. My bones had turned to melting wax. He got almost all of my buttons undone before I was able to rouse myself, to pull myself away, to flee.
I did this wordlessly. As I scrambled down the attic stairs, pushing back my hair, tucking in my blouse, I had the impression that – behind my back – he was laughing at me.
I didn’t know exactly what might occur if I let such a thing happen again, but whatever it was would be dangerous, at least for me. I would be asking for it, I would get what was coming to me, I would be an accident waiting to happen. I couldn’t afford to be alone in the attic with Alex Thomas again, nor could I confide in Laura the reason why. It would be too hurtful to her: she would never be able to understand it. (There was another possibility – he might have been doing a similar kind of thing with Laura. But no, I couldn’t believe that. She never would have allowed it. Would she?)
“We have to get him out of town,” I said to Laura. “We can’t keep this up. They’re sure to notice.”
“Not yet,” said Laura. “They’re still watching the train tracks.” She was in a position to know this, as she was still doing her work with the church soup kitchen.
“Well, somewhere else in town then,” I said.
“Where? There isn’t anywhere else. And this is the best place – this is the one place they’d never think to look.”
Alex Thomas said he didn’t want to get snowed in. He said a winter in the attic would drive him buggy. He said he was going stir-crazy. He said he would walk a couple of miles down the tracks, and hop a freight – there was a high bank there that made it easier. He said that if only he could get as far as Toronto, he could hide out – he had friends there, and they had friends. Then he’d get across to the States, one way or another, where he’d be safer. From what he’d read in the papers, the authorities suspected he might be there already. They certainly weren’t still looking for him in Port Ticonderoga.
By the first week in January, we decided it was safe enough for him to leave. We filched an old coat of Father’s from the back corner of the cloak room for him, and packed him a lunch – bread and cheese, an apple – and sent him away on his travels. (Father later missed the coat and Laura said she’d given it to a tramp, which was a partial truth. As this act was entirely in character for her it wasn’t questioned, only grumbled about.)
On the night of his departure we let Alex out the back door. He said he owed a lot to us; he said he wouldn’t forget it. He gave each of us a hug, a brotherly hug of equal duration for each. It was obvious he wanted to be quit of us. Apart from the fact that it was night, it was oddly as if he were going off to school. Afterwards we cried, like mothers. It was also the relief – that he’d gone away, that he was off our hands – but that is like mothers too.
He left behind one of the cheap exercise books we’d given him. Of course we opened it immediately to see if he’d written anything in it. What were we hoping for? A farewell note, expressing undying gratitude? Kind sentiments about ourselves? Something of that sort.
This is what we found:
“Precious stones?” said Laura.
“No. They don’t sound right,” I said.
“Is it a foreign language?”
I didn’t know. I thought this list looked suspiciously like a code. Perhaps Alex Thomas was (after all) what other people accused him of being: a spy of some kind.
“I think we should get rid of this,” I said.
“I will,” said Laura quickly. “I’ll burn it in my fireplace.” She folded it up, and slid it into her pocket.
A week after Alex Thomas’s departure, Laura came to my room. “I think you should have this,” she said. It was a print of the photograph of the three of us, the one Elwood Murray had taken at the picnic.