From the Chrysalis: a novel Read online

  The dead man had assaulted somebody—Rick perhaps—but the testimony of the witness was unreliable. Even the Judge had said so.

  Liza’s head swam, but she couldn’t stop reading. If nothing else, she had to find out why. The victim was a bootlegger and a drug pusher, a man in his thirties. Somehow Dace had ended up with his friend’s gun. Oh, brother. What did that matter anyway? The boys shouldn’t have been there at all.

  She shouldn’t be here, either. She felt sick to her stomach and figured this was what she got for being so nosy. She had to go to the bathroom.

  Except it was too late. She knew now. None of this could be undone. She glanced furtively around, wondering if anyone else could sense it, the feeling in the pit of her stomach which she realized was shame.

  Her cousin had … Maybe. Well, who knew? Even though she had read something terrible about him, she felt sorry for him. If she hadn’t known him it might have been different, but she did. Besides, he was her kin. Her skin crawled with pity. He must never know that she knew. That she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Something he’d hoped to hide.

  She was a private person herself and would have been horrified to be so exposed. In the newspaper. And what was worse, Liza had gone looking. She glanced over her right shoulder, half expecting some relation to rebuke her. Dace’s dead mother perhaps. This was none of Liza’s damn business. What on earth was wrong with her? Why was she reading such trash? Even if the man had died, it didn’t mean Dace had killed him. It didn’t mean everything in the paper was true.

  She could almost hear her mother saying: you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For once she was powerless to refute her. Her mind stopped processing what she read while her heart raced on. Was it possible to have a heart attack at fourteen?

  Now what? If she photocopied—

  No, she’d never manage such a complicated task today. Besides, she didn’t have any change. Stupid, stupid. She couldn’t ask the snooty clerk for any, either. She just couldn’t. But wait. Her brain leapt briefly to life. She turned the crank at the side of the microfilm reader and scrolled forward, checking for an appeal.

  There was none, but another headline on the Editorial Page a few days later caught her eye: Tougher Jail Term Called For Teenager. She closed her eyes and considered not reading the article, but in the end she had to know what the fool had said.

  D’Arcy Devereux, who is now 18, got off lucky, some will say. Too lucky. How can a man’s life be worth only seven years?

  Devereux, whose juvenile records have been sealed, is rumoured to have first gotten into trouble with the law when he assaulted Father Danby at St. Matthew’s School. Devereux, a vicious young punk who was only ten years old at the time, was eventually released to his father under what is now termed a conspiracy of silence. Then, as now, rather than having the decency to own up to his crime, he claimed that a man of the cloth had indecently assaulted his sister …

  Liza stared at the words. Golden-haired Rosie, a little girl who could pass for a boy. Liza got to her feet and passed the Information Desk, ignoring a posted request to re-file her microfilm. Bad girl, she thought. She hadn’t turned off the reader, either. This time as she walked by, the desk clerk was openly puzzling over her document, a rather complicated looking recipe for Veal Cordon Blue. She was also getting more irate in response to demands made on her time.

  “No, you can’t borrow a staple. How are you going to pay it back?” she snarled at a library patron. Catching sight of Liza fleeing by her desk, she said, “Excuse me, Miss, can you put—”

  But Liza was on automatic. Somehow she located the front doors and walked down the wide staircase, digging her fingers into her crossed arms until she was outside on the busy street where rain dripped onto an unloved lawn. The sidewalk shook as a red and yellow streetcar lumbered by.

  She felt like bawling. Now that she’d read it, the Maitland Spectator had raised more questions than it had answered. Who was Rick? Not that she cared. Dace was the only one who mattered. He, that beautiful boy, was a puzzle for her and the only one she wanted to solve. His face loomed large in her mind and she could still see him, the water dripping from his body, the pond … At least now she knew why he hadn’t written. He had gone to court and lost. No doubt he was too embarrassed, not to mention angry and afraid. What else was a convicted felon supposed to feel? Guilt? She supposed so, but really she had no idea.

  Maybe it was better if he didn’t write. What could she say? He might be guilty. I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, she heard Johnny Cash singing in her mind. Was it possible to be attracted to a killer? How far was love supposed to go?

  But it had been an accident, she reminded herself. Not premeditated. That’s what manslaughter was. Accidental killing. Even so, he had killed a man and was in jail. Him and Rick Lowery. Self-defence. Could a competent lawyer have gotten them off? At the farm, Dace had obviously hated his lawyer. He hadn’t thought much of the media, either. Don’t believe what you read in the papers, he’d said.

  No wonder. Those articles had obviously exaggerated the exploits of their hometown boys for the sake of news. They’d almost spoiled Dace even in her eyes. Even if some of the stories were true, was she supposed to give up on Dace just because of what some stupid newspaper had said?

  “Yes!” her father roared later that week. He licked his thumb and paged through her journal, which he’d found at the bottom of her closet. “Yes!”

  Curiously enough, he seemed more upset by what she had written about him in some of her earlier journal entries than her rather complicated feelings about his nephew. Standing by his easy chair in the living room, she prayed he hadn’t read everything, that she hadn’t been completely exposed. Thank God she had felt too conflicted to write about what had happened at the pond. Watching his eyes as they scoured the pages, she thought she had never felt so naked, not even when she’d stepped out of her dress for Dace. She wanted to leave the room, but the habit of obedience was so engrained she didn’t quite dare.

  “And what does this mean?” her father shouted, reading from her journal here and there. “I have my books/And my poetry to protect me/I am shielded in my armour? What the hell are you trying to protect yourself from? I haven’t laid a finger on you—yet!”

  Her heart thumping, Liza backed away from her father, more frightened by the look in his eyes than anything he’d said so far. Her life was so easy compared to his. He wished she didn’t exist. He exactly say this, but it was implied. Similar scenes continued over the next several weeks, whenever her mother went out. Even sometimes when she was there.

  * * *

  Although her mother had a lot on her mind that year, the only thing she talked about was packing Liza away. First she consulted the next door neighbours who’d overheard her husband roaring, then Liza’s Sunday school teacher and a social worker recommended by a friend. It was easier than talking about the real problem: her husband’s moodiness. That was exacerbated by his drinking, which was episodic but had become rather frequent by 1966. He was in his forties and carried the attitude of someone who’d been gypped. As in: is this all there is? But if Liza left, her mother hoped he might settle down.

  Besides, the girl was crying in her sleep. Liza’s mother told everybody, much to Liza’s dismay. A foster home was one option. Anything to remove her from the path of her father’s rage. It flared intermittently and unpredictably, like a wildfire never quite put out. And if sending her away also took her out of range of her cousin Dace Devereux, so much the better. That boy was nothing but trouble. He always had been, no matter what his people thought. This last bit, at least, she saved for her daughter’s ears alone.

  By Thanksgiving, October 10, Liza found out they were sending her to Dublin, to live with her Granny Magill. Both mother and daughter were numb, and Liza was more than ready to go. It was supposed just be for the school year. She could go to Mount Temple Secondary School there.

  Her mother would keep the boys. Her father
, well, it didn’t matter, because he would do what he wanted anyway. Men are like that, aren’t they? her mother said. He might stay, but only if Liza went away. He couldn’t stand having her in his house. That’s wasn’t exactly what her Sunday school teacher, the person elected to help tell Liza, had said, but she saw it in Miss Comeau’s teary eyes. It had been cool in the church, but her cheeks felt hot. Liza was embarrassed for herself, for all of them. She had fled through the darkened vestry, running out into the street without even waiting for the woman to finish. She never went back to church as long as Miss Comeau volunteered there. The only saving grace was that at least Miss Comeau had listened to Liza’s mother’s stories. At least she was on her side. For there were many sides and many secrets.

  Coincidentally, a real divorce—a separation—was taking place in Liza’s friend Linda’s family. Linda lived just down the street. Strange, because nobody else was getting divorced. Everybody else lived with both a mother and a father, unless the father were dead.

  Liza didn’t think about what was happening to her most of the time, maybe because of the look in her mother’s soft hazel eyes. And because she couldn’t think about it, her memory of wanting to rescue her mother began to dim.

  She thought of Dace instead and wondered what he was doing in jail. She had no idea about his routines, so she concentrated on his feelings. In a bad situation, she figured he would retreat to somewhere in his head. Like she did.

  Chapter 3

  Wayward Cousins

  My cocoon tightens, colors tease,

  I’m feeling for the air;

  A dim capacity for wings

  Degrades the dress I wear.

  *[ Dickinson, Emily, From the Chyrsalis]

  Grandma Magill’s, Dublin, Ireland, 1966-1971:

  Liza had always half-wished they would send her “back home” to Ireland, so she could grow up quickly and move away. And get away from her father, even if he were going to pay her grandmother for room and board. A win-win situation, he’d said. The old girl’s always griping she doesn’t have enough money and now she will. And if Liza went to Dublin and lived in another world, maybe she could stop thinking about Dace. She could stop thinking: even if there is a reason, is any reason good enough?

  Aside from her mother’s unexpected reluctance to let her go, the worst part about leaving Toronto was the flight. She had never flown before and was more scared than she let on. The stranger in the aisle seat beside her, a Country and Western guitarist in his twenties, held her hand and slept on her shoulder for most of the flight.

  She’d expected Dublin to be different from Toronto, but once she’d arrived on the north side, near Findlater’s, it felt like she had never left home. Bricks and mortar. Cars racing in the street. A school filled with girls in little cliques, and teachers too tired to teach. The only difference was in Dublin it rained instead of snowed. And the food was different. Chips and beans for tea, cheaper cuts of meat—when they had any—overcooked peas, lots of potatoes and maybe tinned fruit for a treat.

  “Maeve,” her grandmother said the first time she saw her. “You don’t look anything like our Maeve. You’re a Devereux, aren’t you?”

  Observing the older woman, who was now less than five feet tall, Liza tried to reconcile her fading blue eyes and orthopaedic shoes with the only photo she had ever seen: a black and white studio portrait of the newlywed Mrs. Brigit Magill at eighteen. Now that she was a brisk, bustling woman with a copious amount of white hair bundled up at the nape of her neck who still looked strong.

  Liza had no idea what to say to her. She had never even written to her before. Her mother did all that. She was shown to her own little room at the rear of the four room house. Thank God, she thought. My own room. Her mother had said she might have to share her grandmother’s bed if she had a lodger, but she didn’t have one right now. Maybe she wouldn’t get one as long as Liza’s father paid. Still, the ceiling sloped so low over her flat pillow she was bound to feel buried alive. She would have to focus on the unfamiliar tree close to the tall window, still green in October. And ignore the overflowing garbage pails. Oh, brother, she thought as she gazed out the window. Was that a rat running down the street or just a skinny cat?

  “Do you miss my mother?” she asked.

  Her grandmother stood in the doorway, the jam of it just above her head. Liza had never seen a doorway so small except in an illustrated book of children’s fairytales. The two rooms downstairs had high ceilings, but the upstairs was more like an attic. Where had her mother and all her brothers and sisters slept?

  “I don’t miss her any more than the rest of them,” the older woman had replied, restless hands reaching out and smoothing a worn chenille cover on the small bed. It had once been pink or perhaps white. Liza soon discovered her grandmother was like her mother in that she never stopped working. Liza gazed back out the window. “At least your Ma’s brothers and sisters write regularly. Maeve, now, she only writes when there’s trouble. Speaking of trouble, a letter arrived for you, from your Da’s nephew. A Devereux.”

  Liza swung her head around so sharply she almost hurt her neck. “Dace! Did you read it?”

  “Mother o’ God. That’s the first spark of life I’ve seen since you arrived. Such a skinny, dark little thing you are. Why don’t you take off that pouffy-looking coat and stay a while, Missy?” She shook her head, then extracted the letter from her apron pocket with the air of somebody yanking out a bad tooth. “Someone should have told you that boy’s a convicted felon. The envelope was postmarked from the jail. Why’s he writing here? The cheek of him!”

  Liza stuffed the letter into the pocket of her coat without looking at it. At home it was 7:00 a.m. She was exhausted, almost comatose, from the long, sleepless night on the plane. Knackered, she’d heard the Irish say. But the minute she was alone, she sat on a wooden chair in front of a tiny table overlooking the crammed and cobbled alley, and savoured what Dace had to say.

  I guess you probably heard I’m in Maitland Penitentiary, but it’s not as bad as it seems. I would have written sooner, but I had to earn the privelege [sic]. There is so much I can’t say. I just wanted to let you know there’s a wayward cousin thinking of you in this godforsaken place. If you don’t want to write me, it’s okay. But why are you in Dublin? I had a devil of a time getting your address.

  She wrote him back the next day, borrowing an Irish stamp from her grandmother for the first and last time, in spite of the disapproval in the old woman’s eyes. Liza had to know Dace’s side. Even if it were a bad side, she no longer cared. At the end of a ten page letter, handwritten in her small, neat script, she tucked in, What happened? then set off for her new school and began another long vigil, awaiting his reply.

  She must have scared him, for the long nights ticked by without so much as a note or a postcard arriving. She knew it was because she’d asked why. Had he really shot that man? If so, why? What was happening to him now? Was he scared of everything the way she was all the time? At least she hadn’t asked how he hoped to one day come out of there unscarred. If he didn’t hate her, he must at least think her a fool. You don’t ask questions like that of somebody in prison, you just don’t, no matter how much you wanted to know. She saw that now.

  Christmas came and passed, with letters and cards from her far flung aunts and uncles in Canada and Australia, but she still didn’t hear from him, even after sending him a greeting card with a short, I-don’t-care-what-you-did note inside. She wrote longer letters as well, but somehow they never made it into the post. If you don’t answer me, I’m going to die. If he didn’t answer her by New Years, he probably never would, she despaired. Dear Dace, she scribbled in ink on the inside covers of her notebooks, do you remember me?

  Sometimes she wondered if her grandmother were hiding his letters, but she doubted it. For one thing, although she’d always been a late riser, now she sprinted down the skinny linoleum hallway to intercept the postman long before the older woman had even lit the gas for t
heir morning tea. For another, her grandmother was too tired. Too tired to have custody of a young girl, she started saying. Especially a girl like Liza who ate every speck of sugar in the house and forgot to shut off lights. No matter that both these things, forgetting to turn off the hall light and eating the last sugar cube, had happened only once. Did Liza think money grew on trees?

  It got worse after Liza met Tony Harper, because now her grandmother could say: And let’s not forget the way “she showed her skin to a man who wouldn’t cover it”—at sixteen! And after all she had done for her, too. Liza did her best not to think about Tony. Now she bit her knuckles so she wouldn’t cry. Well, she thought, she has me there.

  Many evenings the older woman fell asleep before 8:00 while Liza reread C. S. Lewis’s Tales of Narnia and daydreamed through William Butler Yeats. Narnia seemed even more magical knowing Lewis had woven Ireland into his work. Although she would have loved to visit the Mourne Mountains and Dunluce Castle more often, places that had given birth to the dreams of Lewis, she almost never left Dublin over the next five years. Her grandmother, careful as she was, couldn’t afford it. The money her father sent, when he remembered, wasn’t enough. On the rare occasions she went on a school trip to Dunluce Castle, the Giant’s Causeway, or Newgrange, she was thrilled. It was always a hassle crossing the border, though.

  Ireland, she thought, her fingers tracing an ancient Celtic swirl on one of the stones. I’ve come back to the land of my ancestors’s dreams. But the school trip she treasured most was going to see the Book of Kells. For an hour or so she escaped her classmates and walked the streets where some of her favourite authors had once walked. From the moment she saw Trinity, that’s where she wanted to go to university. Oscar Wilde, the author of The Ballad of Reading Goal, had gone to school there.

  “None of the Magills have ever gone to university,” her grandmother said. Her lips were pursed around a clothes peg as she stripped sheets from a clothesline slung over her stove. She was also canning jelly, so a big pot of rolling water sat on the stove.