Coming up from the lane Harold did not pause at his cottage except to toss hat and driving gloves onto one of the chairs in the outdoor room that some people might call a veranda. One glove missed and fell on the floor and he made it five steps away before he turned back and settled the fallen object beside its mate.
“Is this obsessive compulsive behaviour? Is it getting worse as I age?” he asked of the cat who had a habit of sitting in the crook of a birch clump and who more than one person had mistaken for a garden ornament. “Should I even try to fight it? Is it an aberration of harmless eccentricity or a signal of something sinister?” The cat did not reply and as he turned to continue along the path he caught sight of the back of a figure on the sunny slope of the garden picking climbing beans.
“Polly’s sister has come for a visit,” was his first thought with surprise and delight at this unexpected happening but was instantly slapped away by the knowledge that Polly did not have a sister. Polly was an only child and always had been. This had happened before. Harold stopped in the shadow of the trees, struck by an extra ingredient this time, not yet able to cope with that, needing to make some sense of the other times.
Oh, it was not isolate-able, the sister thing and Polly’s’ness. He took a moment to taste the flavor of the word isolate-able, wondering if it actually existed or if it sprung from his need for such a word. No, the situations weren’t…isolate-able. He could bring to mind the times, maybe six or seven, when he had thought Polly had a sister – once the phone had rung and a woman’s voice had asked for Polly and Harold had opened mouth to call, “It’s you sister –“ but realized such a person did not exist before he had spoken; once he had actually said to Paul, Polly’s father, at some family gathering, “Too bad your other daughter couldn’t make it” and Paul had given him a puzzled look and Harold had laughed and said, “Too many daughters of my own; I guess I keep inventing more.” as a way of explanation. Other situations like that. By themselves, even collectively, they did not add up to meaning. They were all just part of that nameless quality to do with Polly that he had never understood. Polly’s’ness.
He had asked, oh god, he had asked. He wanted so much to understand this Polly’s’ness. The one time he had taxed her with it, demanded an answer, demanded even acknowledgement - she had left. Just left. Him and the children. She’d come back, of course.
“We won’t speak of it again,” he had said. And she had looked at him not in anger, not contritely, not in relief. She had looked at him with such a peculiar expression as if – as if she was somehow waiting for him to catch up.
Oh Polly I have been trying, he thought. And sneaked a quick look back into the sunny garden where the woman who was not Polly’s sister, nor, this time, was it Polly, was still picking beans.
Harold stared at the peeling bark of an arbutus tree and remembered…
There had been a number of incidences over the years. Some totally different. Some of a pattern.
The first time had occurred when they were barely acquainted yet exploring the old souls feeling of having known each other before. They were walking along a street and it was dark and it was late. Suddenly Polly had dropped into a bit of a crouch, extended her arms, swung half-way round. She was wearing a sort of cape and it was very dramatic.
Before his face had settled into an amused and appreciative grin, before he had time to form an inquiry, she had righted herself and walked on as if nothing had happened. He wondered at the time if she had had a sudden gas pain or womanly complaint – his mother used to clutch her stomach at times and mutter “time of month” – and was embarrassed to acknowledge it.
It was only later, after a few more episodes, that he had equated that initial reaction with the dark alley they had passed and the scarcely-discerned movement along it.
Then, for a time, he thought she was just responding to danger, perhaps calling on some primeval call to action, some instinct of stance. But then he realized she was instrumental in preventing disasters.
Once, on vacation and rest-stopping by a lovely village on a lake, Cass, then barely two, had suddenly walked to the end of a pier, stumbled on something, and headed toward the water. Polly, who had been on the far side of Harold and at least ten feet away, was suddenly there and gripping Cass’ arm as she fell. It was as if she had passed through Harold.
“There, there, mucushala,” she said to the startled child steadying her back on the dock.
“How did you do that?” Harold had asked. Neither he nor Polly could swim.
“Let’s get an ice cream,” she replied, not looking at him. He might have persisted but Cass had gleefully started back up the pier in a wavering run and he went after her. And he didn’t refer to it again. He also came to realize Polly could put up a wall of silence that was impossible to penetrate.
Once, in broad daylight, he saw her in the hall going into the back bedroom – he was coming down from the attic after an unsuccessful attempt to find something – and then when he got to the kitchen he could see her sitting in the garden.
He had run quietly and quickly back up to the second floor but the only person in the back bedroom was one of the girls sleeping on the cot bed under the eaves.
He had run quickly and not quietly down to the garden and reached out a hand to touch the Polly sitting on a lounge chair.
“I just saw you upstairs,” he said, breathless, not only from the physical exertion.
“Was checking on Penny. I hope this will be her first and last time with hangover.”
He ignored the red herring. He stood there thoughtfully for a moment. She had looked at him to answer his unspoken query but now was back to sewing whatever was taking up space on her lap.
“I know about teleporting,” he told her.
After a pause she said, “I don’t.”
He had had the strongest desire to shake her, or get down on his knees and plead with her, and both alarmed him so he went away. That time, as well, come to think of it, he’d gone to visit his mother at the cemetery. Except that time he’d never gotten there at all because a man on a scooter had run into a dog and Harold had stopped to help.
Then had come the time they were walking along a street, Foul Bay Avenue, Josephine in a stroller being pushed by Harold, Cass holding to its side, Sarah holding Polly’s hand. It was the most gorgeous of autumn days after a rain, the leaves shiny and fragrant. A car suddenly shot at them from a driveway, backing. Polly was closest to the oncoming car, Sarah between her and Harold. Harold reacted instinctively by pushing the stroller with Josephine forward taking Cass with it. Almost in slow motion, or it would seem to Harold later, Polly put up her hand, palm facing the car. Harold had the uncanny but distinct impression that the car plowed into them but it did not and then they were all past the driveway and the car had slammed on its brakes and was skidding on wet leaves as it pivoted on the boulevard and came to a halt. The woman driver’s mouth was an O of astonishment and horror. Then she seemed to collect herself, put the car in forward, drive off the boulevard and onto the road, drive off.
“There, there, bunnies,” Polly was saying to her brood, Cass hiccuping because that is what she did when she tried not to cry, Josephine wide-eyed and solemn, Sarah saying, “I don’t like cars that do that.”
“All’s well that ends well,” said Polly as they continued but her voice sounded strange.
Afterward, when they were home, he determined to talk about it. He battered the wall of silence. “What do you do? How do you do it?”
He had cornered her in the laundry room where she was putting clothes in the washer and she continued to do so but he could see the muscle in the side of her jaw tight with tension. She did not answer.
Harold put out his hand and grasped her arm. “Polly, talk to me about this. Please.”
She looked down at where his hand was gripping her arm, wrinkling it, turning it white around his fingers. He let go and she pushed past him and left. He stood there. She was so normal and so dependable and so accessible. Except in this.
When he went to look for her she had left. No one knew where.
She was gone for three days. And he simply waited. Sketched in the blanks if someone called. Took care of the children. He could not have described how he felt then – nor could he now. It was a brand new – or very old – situation. He was waiting.
She came back. Just showed up as if she had been out shopping. Harold saw her go upstairs – he wondered if it were really she – and then she came back downstairs, having changed out of the clothes she had been wearing when she left three days before into clean ones, and into the garden where he was showing Sarah how to make cat’s cradle with string. Josephine was asleep on a blanket on the grass. Cass was at nursery school.
“Where were you?” Sarah wanted to know in a grieved tone. “I couldn’t find my socks with lace and Daddy couldn’t either.”
“I’m home now, chickadee.” she said, scooping up Josephine and Harold would never forget the look in her eyes as the sleeping child curled into her and sighed.
He stared at her and she stared back. If something passed between them, some promise, some com-promise, he couldn’t have said what it was but he felt strangely fulfilled.
Maybe it was something he could have talked over with Polly’s sister – if she had one.
Harold sighed himself out of his reverie and turned to look at the woman who was still picking beans in the garden. Now he could deal with the extra facet of this extraordinary adventure. This woman had short hair.
Polly’s dark hair had always been long, changing, over the years, from a pony-tail when he first knew her, to a bun as the children matured her, to a low-slung chignon or tail in her middling years. This woman had hair that ended at her neck.
He picked up a small stone and flicked it toward her. It struck the ground beside her and she turned.
It was Polly. Polly with hair that capped her face, that angled across her forehead in a bang.
She laughed at his expression.
“You look totally different,” he told her, walking forward slowly, somehow reassured by the familiar sound of her laughter.
She parody’ed a fashion statement consideration by tilting her head this way and that, causing the hair to swing against her chin. Her neck looked longer and somehow fragile, vulnerable.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I have to get used to it.” He took the basket of beans from her hands, set it on the ground, turned her this way and that. “What made you decide to do this? Wow, I go away for an hour or so and you change years.”
She laughed again. “Well, I’ve had it in mind for years, I think. Just never got around to it, or had the courage, I guess. Then, after that….,” she waved her hand toward the cottage. “Well, I just drove to Magicuts and said to myself, if someone can cut my hair right now and I feel okay that they know what I have in mind, then I’ll do it. And they did and he did.”
“It looks sort of Dutch.”
“His idea. His name is Desmond. I wasn’t imagining something quite so different, certainly not bangs, but apparently my hair was ‘demanding’ this style.”
“Makes life a little more sufferable with me?” he asked, picking up the beans again, trying for a casual tone.
She looked at him and waited until she had his full attention. “I was at my mother’s,” she told him and it was not her ordinary voice. He knew exactly what she meant. He knew exactly when she meant. Those three days all those years ago.
Her mother had been dead for many years, well before the time to which she was referring. Did she identify so strongly with her mother that she referred to her family home now as her mother’s even when her mother had long not been there?
“Your father knew where you were? “ Harold started to feel oddly cheated. Harold didn’t think Paul knew that Polly had left for three days.
“No. I mean my mother’s place. She owned a house in the Highlands. It’s still in her name.”
Harold said, “I never knew that.”
“Neither does my father.”
He didn’t know what to say. They stood there together, picking beans.