The Quintland Sisters(100)
Seeing the four of them at the funeral after all these years, the weight of their grief—I don’t think I could have made my way back out of the church if you hadn’t at that moment laid your hand on my sleeve. I’ve told you this a dozen times over the past two months, but seeing you again, so changed yet so much the same, it was as if my lungs were being filled like bagpipes, like a stone was being rolled off my heart.
I digress. What I mean to say is that I couldn’t care less what the wagging tongues of Callander might be saying about you and me and our middle-aged romance. The truck comes Tuesday to collect the few things that I’m keeping from the old home, and the buyers have agreed to take the rest. I’ve spent these last days scrubbing and scouring (I found your suit button, by the way—it had slipped into a crack in the floorboards, underneath the bed). Now I’m exhausted and ready to be gone. Colin Stuart, my old classmate from New York and now an instructor at the Municipal Art Centre, has taken care of all the arrangements for my accommodation in Ottawa, plus organized my train tickets. All I need to do is show up at the station here Wednesday, board the correct car, and he’s done the rest. I speak to his art class at the centre on Thursday.
I’m looking forward to having a few days to prowl around the National Museum and perhaps take my paints and easel somewhere along the Ottawa River. The colors should be spectacular now, as long as the weather holds. Here in Callander the maple trees are finally dropping their fiery hues, leaves drifting down like sparks. The weatherman on the radio keeps warning about a hurricane they’ve named Hazel, brewing in the Caribbean and expected to make its way up the Eastern Seaboard: promise me you’ll keep away from your planes and stay on solid ground if it starts heading your way. I’m hoping it will peter out before Ottawa so I can do a little painting en plein air. The opening for my exhibit is Saturday—if you can get away for the night, please do come. Otherwise I’ll see you on the 18th in Toronto. I still shrink like a violet at these public events, although they’ve gotten easier. I like to remind myself of something you told me many years ago, although you’ve likely forgotten. I was dithering about whether to apply for art school and you told me in no uncertain terms to “do the harder thing.” It was very pithy, however you put it. Something like, it is in doing the hardest things that we find ourselves the happiest, and that when we’re happy, the harder things come easy. I’ve lived by those words for a long time now.
And the thing is, I am happy, Lewis. I’m happier than I ever thought I could be. I was terrified at the idea of coming back here, to Callander, for Em’s funeral, of running the risk of seeing, face-to-face, the man who haunted my nightmares for so long. But I couldn’t not come, could I? I feel I owed that to Em, at the very least, and I owed that to the others too. No one has loved them like I have. My whole life long.
I shudder to think: what if I hadn’t forced myself to come back for the funeral? What if you hadn’t gotten leave to attend? I’m a staunch atheist, but it’s hard not to believe in some greater force, yanking on invisible levers to make our paths cross again, all these years later. What I realize now is that what happened to me back on that train didn’t ruin my life, but it certainly sent me on a radically different course. Probably, I must admit, for the better. If it hadn’t happened, I’m not sure I would have followed through with Mrs. Fangel and the Art Students League, and I likely wouldn’t be the person I am today, a woman who could come back to this place, my head held high. Lewis, I can’t help but wish we hadn’t spent all these years apart, you and I, that I had summoned the courage to tell you everything earlier. But I wasn’t ready for this back then. I’m ready now.
It was a perfect evening on the shore, crisp and clear and calm: it’s a damn shame we didn’t get to share it. Even your blue heron, swooping low over the lake, seemed sorry to see me sitting alone. The lake was still, and when the clouds parted it was as if the twilight had been burnished, the breeze stirring the water coral, bronze, and copper. I couldn’t mix that color with my paints if I tried.
I sat on our log (as I’ve come to think of it), listening to the leaves whispering their secrets and smiling over a secret of my own. Our secret, really, although maybe it’s too soon to say for sure. Let me say this, for now. I was lobbing pebbles into the water and watching the gilded ripples rolling away as if through molten metal when it struck me: the shores of Lake Nipissing are absolutely littered with stones. Did you notice that when we were here together? I didn’t until tonight, although I admit my attention was occupied elsewhere. I always remember you telling me that you and your father had dredged up every last one of these enchanted pebbles from the lake and hauled them away to Quintland. There, of course, they disappeared into the pockets of barren women, tourists, and collectors to be whisked away to the four corners of the world. And yet here they are, returned as if by magic and free for the taking. Shall I bring you one as proof? Perhaps Lake Nipissing was holding on to a few good-luck stones on the off chance we’d come back. Maybe it’s our turn to be lucky.
I can’t wait to see you.
Love,
E.
Author’s Note
When he died in 1943, Dr. Allan R. Dafoe had amassed a personal fortune of $182,466—roughly equivalent to the savings of each of the Dionne quintuplets at that time.
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