don’t tell her, then, that we were here. It was a surprise. The child’s surprise.”
They re-button their coats, and her Papa puts her hat on back to front. He holds his head up as they walk to the stairwell, as their steps echo on the way down.
They are getting in the car, they are in the car, in fact, when Suzanne sees a dark blue automobile pull into the space on the other side of the lot. The door slices open, and a man unfolds who might be Mommy’s boss but without the glasses. Then the other door.
“There! There’s Mommy! C’mon, Papa.”
She would have been out the door, but for the hand blocking the lock button.
“No . . . no,” her father whispers. “This will just be a secret, okay? Just a secret.”
He wrenches himself around and adjusts the rearview mirror, and Suzanne can see him holding the secret in. He is in pain, her Papa, but he is clamping it all in. Her Papa can do it. Maybe she can, too. The drive home is quiet, which gives her time to think.
Little Sue can keep secrets. She kept the one about the broken trophy at the back of the classroom, the result of a ball thrown by Alan Conway. In a way, Suzanne and her father are like spies, two secret agents on missions to save the world. Robert Cardinal and Fire Engine Sue.
In the winter, the path beside the river is filled up with snow, but Suzanne can get partway down, as far as the little clearing where she would like to build her penguin house.
Penguins like snow. It’s normal for them, like her beanbag chair is normal for her. She works hard and alone, packing snow, building up ridges. There will be levels, like steps, for them to come and go. She loves the way their wings flap just a little. The ones she saw at the zoo with Auntie Sophie flapped their wings a bit and did not so much fly as waddle over to the next rock. She could do that. Anyone could. She likes penguins, because they are not show-offs.
“A frozen home for you, like living in a popsicle.”
It would be too cold for her. Already her parents have warned her about the terribly cold temperatures this winter. She doesn’t feel it, except in her fingers and toes. They get wet and stay wet the entire afternoon. One more little flat part to make, and the first part of the penguin house will be finished. Wind whips around her ears, and she pulls her toque lower. She lies sideways in the snow, eyeing the level of the platform. It looks good. Even. Penguins could dance.
It is silent like this. Her left ear, pressed to the ground and muffled by the snow, hears nothing. Her right hears only the whisper of the wind. She lies there for a while, watching the snow “V” made by her mitten. It’s so quiet. The voices of her parents fade, the tears and the choked up words at night, like the song she liked that wouldn’t come in on the car radio, her parents’ voices and the car radio, fading in and out and getting buried when they drove through the tunnel.
She is cold, then not so cold. She is thinking of resting before heading back onto the windy pathway. She is supposed to stop at Mrs. Reidel’s to see if she needs anything, but she has worked hard, and she deserves a rest, just a short one. She lies in the snow waiting for the penguins to arrive.
When the feeling comes, she almost doesn’t know it. When it comes, she is comfortable and sleepy, and she feels nothing much, just weary and so cozy. The feeling works harder, pushing at the edges, jabbing at her with needle spikes.
“Ow . . .” she murmurs softly. Tiny shifting left and right.
Jab.
“Ow!”
She wants to sleep, just sleep. And then a girl is sleeping, too, and everybody’s crying. Her mother in a veil, her father’s knuckles white. There are flower smells, lilies and roses and those yellow things Mrs. Reidel grows.
And she must get up. She must push up from the soft world. White lights are burning into her, long corridors of light lead her forward, stumbling, incandescence of short candles, toward a village in the distance. Penguins. And home.
A girl in a blue cloth jacket and a red toque is found in a clearing by the river path. She is carrying no identification and is taken to the local clinic where Nurse Carter recognizes Suzanne and calls her parents.
Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, is going to the hospital in the next town, where the doctors will take her temperature, which everyone is watching like the stock market, and will take the baby finger on her right hand.
There will be consultation and wailing, but when Suzanne returns home, she will have one finger less to count on.
Cards arrive from the school, her mother’s work and a few of the children Suzanne knows. The church sends over fruit and a Bible, and Mrs. Reidel has Florence, her part-time helper, bring over a stuffed animal. It is only when Suzanne sees the squat funny penguin that she realizes Mrs. Reidel knows. She knows what happened in the clearing. What good is a gift if you can’t use it now and then, she’d say. She’d open the tin of biscuits, and they would munch conspiratorially, and the afternoon would slide like snow from the roof of a car.
In spring, when Suzanne is back at school (“no more strange feelings, not for a long time”), something happens in the town. Mr. Laturelle’s son, Frank, who has been away so long that Suzanne doesn’t remember him, returns. But not alone. No. He arrives with shoulder-length, matted hair, a beard and a girlfriend named Holly.
Holly is a hippie. That’s what Mrs. Craig at the library said. Holly has long, straight hair with a braid at either side of her face. She wears long cotton dresses with flowers and squiggles on them and sometimes a coat that is shorter than the dress or, when it is warmer, a shawl almost the same as Mrs. Reidel’s. Her glasses, too, are like Mrs. Reidel’s, round metal frames that sit on her nose or the top of her head.
Suzanne has seen her precisely three times so far, but Holly has fascinated her each time. The first time, it was still snowy out, and Holly was wearing old boots and the too-short coat. She was coming out of the IGA, and Suzanne was going in with her parents. Her mother moved aside completely to let Holly pass. As she did, the hippie girl looked right at Suzanne and said, “Can’t wait till we can wear sandals, eh?”
Which seemed like such a sensible thing to say that Suzanne replied, “Yeah, and shorts, too,” before feeling her arm yanked.
Suzanne has seen her on two other occasions, and the woman always seems to notice her.
And now Suzanne hears that Holly and Frank are going to have a baby. A baby! She didn’t even know they were married. And now it is Mrs. Craig’s voice that is rising in the library as she goes on about hell and handbaskets. She almost thumps the book on Suzanne’s missing finger.
“Oh . . . sorry, Little Sue. You go home now. It’s not safe for kids to be out on the street any more.”
Suzanne hasn’t seen Holly for a while. Frank is working in his father’s store, his hair in a ponytail and his beard shorter and less scraggly. She could ask Frank. The shop is on her way home, so it is no trouble to stamp her rainboots on the mat outside and open the door into this world of penny candy, fly-paper and sewing machine oil.
Frank is bringing a box out from the back of the store. He plops
