Who Is Frances Rain? Read online

  Frances’s cabin came slowly into focus. I felt my hair fly back with a blast of freezing air. Autumn was over. It was night. The snow lay thick on the roof and had piled in smooth banks around the low walls.

  I felt the sting of bitter cold as it cut into my face and through my thin shirt. Ahead of me, snow as fine as flour swirled off the trees, blocking out the cabin for a few seconds. With the moment of clearing, the wide blue snowdrifts seemed to shift and breathe around the darkened logs, and a pale light from a window picked out the falling crystals.

  Someone was home, yet there were no footprints in the layer of smooth snow ahead. I walked towards the cabin, feeling my feet bump over blueberry bushes, rocks and fallen logs below the ghostly snow. At last, I stood waist deep in snow at the front door.

  This time when I touched the handle, I felt its roughness under my fingers. I pushed against the door. It was like pushing against a damp sponge. I almost fell forward when it opened inwards. Snow fell in clumps onto the floor at my feet. I quickly shut it behind me, using all my strength. Finally, I heard a faint far-off click as its lock shut.

  A fire burned low in the grate, and I was glad to feel its faint warmth. Beside the fire, a small bed had been pulled close. Someone was lying in the bed I’d slept in so many summers.

  In the flickering firelight, I saw the bookshelves crammed with books, the little blue table by the window, and fur rugs on the wood floor. Behind me, hanging on the wall, were the stretchers and traps I’d seen Frances working on.

  I looked at the woman on the bed. Her face was as familiar as my own. Her eyes were closed, and the black hair along her forehead was curly and damp with sweat. In her sleep, she frowned and her hands moved restlessly back and forth on top of the covers. The gold signet ring gleamed in the firelight. She moved a hand to her mouth and coughed. It echoed in the silent room.

  Slowly her eyes opened and she turned her head to look at me. I laid the sketchbook in her hands. When her fingers closed over it, I felt a tingly shock run up my arms. Her face was deep with shadows and her thin body hardly made a rise under the covers. She tried to lift the book, but its weight sagged beneath her almost lifeless fingers. She looked at me in despair.

  Kneeling beside her, I opened the book and held it up for her to see the inscription. She lifted her head to speak, and fell back exhausted, but there was a fire in her eyes. They followed the writing on each page and the bloodless lids opened in amazement when she realized what she was looking at.

  Page by page, I watched her drink in what her daughter had done. The last drawing in the book was of Frances, sitting and reading at the little blue table, her moccasined feet resting on the lower rungs of the chair.

  Frances’s finger lifted from the bedcovers and touched the drawing, and she read the short paragraph beside it. Her eyes travelled up to my face and she studied it closely.

  “I’m Lizzie,” I said.

  She nodded. She knew. She fought to keep her eyes open, but the heavy lids closed. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so helpless. It was then that I felt her fingers wrap around my wrist. It was the same feeling as when a spider web clings to you, light, yet curiously strong.

  She opened her mouth to speak. I leaned close to her face and felt her breath stir my hair.

  “I left everything too late.” She touched the sketchbook. “Give this to Teresa, my dearest girl. Tell her I’ve seen it. Tell her I would have come.”

  I heard the words as though down a long tunnel, faint yet clear as crystal, “I would have come.”

  I nodded, not daring to speak, took the book and backed slowly away. Her face, relaxed now, was beautiful and calm in the firelight. I walked forward again and touched her open hand with my fingertips. Her fingers closed over mine, then released them and her eyes fluttered open.

  They followed me as I walked to the door. How could I leave her? I started back towards the bed and the warmth of the fire, but she held up her hand to stop me. Outside the snow touched the windows and melted, their tears slowly moving down the glass. I clutched the book closer to me, and as the images around me began to fade, I wanted to cry out, “Not yet, not yet.”

  I hadn’t even got to know her, really. I’d only seen her through a few dreamlike days. Nobody had got to know my great-grandmother very well, except maybe the girl. Terry. My gran.

  Our eyes met across the room and we said good-bye in our hearts, and then she was gone. I found myself standing in the middle of the cabin site, the tears still wet on my face, the sketchbook in my hands.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  ALEX said nothing when I stumbled to the shore, but I felt his arm go around my shoulders. After my sobbing slowed down to a few choking gulps, he helped me into the boat and handed me a grubby cloth from under the seat to mop up my face.

  Tying up at Gran’s a few minutes later, he said, “I saw the Happy Gang, all four of them, over on Whisky Rock picking berries. So they’re out of the way. I’ll stay here, on the dock while you talk to Terry, okay?”

  I bit my lip and nodded. I had to carry out Frances’s last wish. Halfway up the path, I stopped. How could I tell my practical, down-to-earth grandmother that I’d just shown her sketchbook to her dying mother? I’d have to think something up. Like maybe the tooth fairy gave it to me.

  I found her in her bedroom, lying under the same comforter I’d just seen on my great-grandmother’s bed. My bed.

  “Elizabeth. Good. Someone to talk to. Listen, explain to your family that I won’t drop dead if they talk to me. I’m getting awfully bored. Now, what —” She stared at the sketchbook and sat up. “Where did you get that?”

  All I could say was, “You’re Frances Rain’s daughter. You visited her when you were a girl and you left this behind.”

  “How ... when ... ?”

  “Don’t get too upset, Gran.”

  “I’m not upset, where ... ?” Her hands reached out.

  “The doctor said no stress. I shouldn’t have surprised you with this. I should have talked to you first. Are you okay?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Lizzie, will you shut up? I’m not going to fall over dead. But I will, out of spite, if you don’t tell me where you found that!” She struggled to sit up farther. “The Pepins gave me everything they’d taken from the cabin after she died.”

  “Alex and I have been excavating her cabin. We found this in a tin box. They must have missed it. It’s in good shape, huh?”

  “You found it in her cabin? You mean she saw it?” Her face split into a wide, incredulous grin. “She did find it. She did know how much I loved it there. Frances didn’t talk much, you see. It was hard for her.”

  She was quiet for a moment and I knew she was once again standing on the landing rock that first day, her grandfather and the canoe disappearing in the distance, her mother walking away from her up the path.

  “But then,” she continued, blinking and shaking her head, “you don’t know what on earth I’m blathering on about, do you?”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone you were her daughter? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She picked at a thread on the quilt. “Frances wanted it that way. Her pride wouldn’t let her tell anyone around here that she had borne an illegitimate child. The man was a prominent politician in Winnipeg. And he was married.”

  “So no one knows?”

  She shook her head. “The Pepins knew. I got in touch with them when I came up north. They’d kept everything for me for years. Of course, they’re both dead now.” She looked at the sketchbook. “And for years, I thought she’d decided not to come and get me. That she didn’t want me.”

  “The Papa in the book is my great-great?”

  “Yes. He was a very bitter man and he made sure I knew that my mother was a fallen woman ... who’d hated the sight of her sickly baby.”

 
“You were sick?”

  “I had a heart murmur. In those days that was tantamount to living on the edge of death. At least that’s what Papa wanted Frances to believe. He used it against her — a punishment for humiliating him in his closed little middle-class world. He’d warned her that if she took me, it would surely kill me.”

  “When did you first meet her?

  “One day, when I was nine, she came to our new place in Calgary. Papa had opened a grocery store there. Grandma was dying and she wanted to see Frances one last time.”

  “Did you talk to her much?”

  “She wasn’t a talker, my mother. But I knew when she looked at me that she didn’t hate me as Papa said she did.”

  “What happened?”

  “She took me to the doctor, who reassured her that when I was about thirteen, I would probably be over this heart problem. So Frances went to Papa and said that she wanted me with her. He said my death would be on her hands. That he knew me better than some doctor. She believed him. She left the day of Grandma’s funeral.”

  “But he finally brought you to see her?”

  “How do you know that?”

  I poked a finger at the book. “This.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So how come he agreed?”

  She smiled. “Frances wrote to him when I was thirteen. She said that there would be no more money if he didn’t bring me up here. His grocery and hardware store wasn’t doing very well. She’d sent him a lot of money over the years. I suspect that he painted a picture of poverty and starvation for her poor little girl. He was like that. I had no idea she’d been sending money all those years. For me.”

  “And he used your heart problem to keep you with him?”

  “Or he kept me with him to finance his failing business.” She smiled bitterly. “He was supposed to bank the money for me. But he spent it all on the business.”

  “Did he leave you anything when he died?”

  “There wasn’t anything to leave except the store, and he willed that to some cousins in Winnipeg.”

  “Well,” I said. “At least you had Rain Island.”

  She nodded. “He hoped that the trip would make me too weak to stay. I fooled him. I just got better and better. I kept asking Frances why I couldn’t stay for good, but she’d just shake her head. Then one day, she returned from a supply trip and said she’d sent him a letter telling him that I’d be staying the winter. Until spring. I was ecstatic, but I could see she was worried about his temper. She got very broody about it.”

  “She figured he’d come and get you?”

  “Yes. He needed me. To punish her for every-thing that had gone wrong in his life. He blamed her for everything.”

  “And here I thought I’d like to live in the past,” I said, “to get away from my family. At least my family is still talking. Sort of.”

  “Oh, you’ll be okay, the bunch of you. Frances and my grandfather never patched things up. That’s no way to live. Or die.”

  “He must have really hated her, eh?” I said in awe.

  “Hated her? Or loved her too much. I don’t know. He’d tried for years to smother her independence, to keep her near him. He left Winnipeg because he couldn’t stand the shame, he said. But it was to take me as far away from her as possible.”

  “And that’s why he had to come back to Rain Island. He couldn’t stand to see you two happy together.”

  “That’s right. How do you know all this?”

  “A wild guess?” I said, hopefully.

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Humph. Now, give me the book.”

  I handed it to her and watched while the pages slowly turned.

  “When she didn’t write me after I was forced to leave, I thought she must have stopped caring. For months I waited for her to write. Papa kept telling me I was better off without her.”

  “She’d never have stopped caring,” I said softly.

  “I guess I knew in my heart she wouldn’t forget me. When I found out she’d been dead for months and he hadn’t told me, we had a terrible fight. At the time, I really believed he had arranged her death.”

  “Really?”

  She gave me a thin smile. “We never spoke of it again, but when I was nineteen, I left him and came here to teach. Just as she had. Four years later, I married your Grandpa Bill. A man as different from my grandfather as one can get — didn’t care two pins for getting rich. I tracked down the doctor who’d done the autopsy. Mother died of pneumonia. If I’d been here I might have helped her. That was another reason for not forgiving Papa.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “He died a year after I moved here. He’d never have understood Frances or me if he’d lived to be a hundred.” She sighed. “I guess I’m no better with my own daughter. Connie’s always been so different from me. Frances and I were painted with the same brush. I had hoped

  She sagged back into her pillows.

  “But you can’t make someone into something you want them to be,” I said. “That’s what you’ve always told me.”

  Her eyes were still on me, but she wasn’t seeing me. She was working out something in her mind. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yes, I have told you that. Too bad I couldn’t take my own advice. But maybe it’s not too late. Maybe Connie and I can get to know each other again.” She hesitated, then pointed across the room. “Open up that top drawer, the little one in the middle. Bring me the small wooden box. That’s it. Open it.”

  I couldn’t help it — I gasped. It lay on a piece of soft suede, smooth and golden, its band worn thin at the back. In the middle of the flat gold face, I could make out a faint but clear scrolled F. It was Frances Rain’s signet ring.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “IT’S yours now,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You and I can share her memory. She’d like that.” I tried to argue but she held up her long hand. “It was sent to my grandfather. I found it in his desk a few months after I’d returned to live with him. That’s when I knew she was dead.”

  I slipped it onto my middle finger. I felt warm and tingled a bit.

  “I have something else for you, Gran,” I said. I took the spectacles out of my pocket and handed them to her.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” she said. She put them on the end of her nose and pushed them back. For one brief moment, I saw the long narrow face of the girl from Rain Island. Then she took them off and she was Gran again. Pale and tired. She lay back on her pillows. “Poor Frances. All alone at the end.”

  “Gran? What are you going to do this winter? I could stay with you. Go to school here.” I sat down facing her and put my head on her bony chest. “I don’t want you to be alone like Frances.”

  She laid a large hand over my head. “I’ve got that all worked out, honey. May and I talked it over when I was there yesterday. I’ll move in with her. We’re both getting on and she could do with some help on her quilting during those long winter days. I’ll sell the house in Fish Narrows. And you’ll be with me next summer. Won’t you?”

  I nodded, my head moving under her hand. I was too busy snuffling to say anything.

  “I’ll wait till you come back, don’t you worry. May says you can work at the lodge over the next month or so to get your feet wet. Then if you want to, you can work steady there next summer.”

  I looked up. “But —”

  “It’ll be just like always, only better. And don’t forget, Alex will need a place to stay in Winnipeg when he goes to university after next summer’s over. Who knows? Anything can happen, eh? You have an extra room in that house of yours. Would save him a lot of money.”

  I wiped my eyes and grinned. The sound of voices, loud arguing voices, floated through the window beside us. They were back.

  “Now go and get your family and
bring them here. Tell Tim I wish to be escorted to the living room for tea and that chocolate cake. Okay, okay. Tea and toast for me. Even so, I’m awfully hungry.” She pushed pins into the small knot of hair on the top of her head and smoothed the sides with her hands. “I’m thirsty as a drunk on payday.”

  We laughed like two kids with a wonderful secret. Maybe someday I’d tell her about the Rain Island ghosts. For now, it was just plain wonderful to know that the girl I’d been watching and worrying about — my girl from Rain Island — had been with me all my life. And to know that Frances was finally at peace.

  I ran out of the house and down the path, my feet barely touching the ground. That boat, filled with its grumbling passengers, was just nudging up to the dock. A pot of blueberries had spilled all over the bottom of the boat. Erica was wailing, so it wasn’t hard to tell whose it was.

  “If you’d waited two more seconds before lurching all around the place, Evan, this wouldn’t have happened,” growled Tim, shutting off the motor. The boat glanced off the dock and hit the shore with a bump.

  Three other pails slid around on the seat and Mother lunged at them.

  “If you’d quit swinging the boat back and forth,” snarled Evan, “I wouldn’t have slipped and hit the stupid pail.” He moaned loudly at the purple juice squashed against the white canvas of his sneakers. “Damn!”

  “Now, Evan, what have I told you about your language?” said Mother, underlining a few words with her voice.

  “Baaah!” howled Erica, pointing at the crushed berries under her feet.

  I stood on the end of the dock, grinning. Alex tiptoed towards me and said, “Is everything all right?”

  I laughed. “Well, I’ve got some good news about Gran and May. And you and me. At least I think you’ll think it’s good. So ... is everything all right?” I looked over my shoulder at my family. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”