Taking a Chance on Love Page 8

  “Bruce, I think your line’s moving.”

  He turned quickly to check it. “No, it isn’t.”

  He looked back at me. “I care about you, Meg.”

  “You care about me?”

  “Well, yes, I care about what happens to you … I’m ambitious for you. I’m ambitious for me, too. One more skin graft to go — the most important one — and when that’s done and finished with, I’m going after a degree in law. I intend to stay with the Navy and make it my career.”

  But I was still thinking about, “I care about you, Meg.”

  At the end of July, Amy told me that Glen was leaving the Landing to live with his mother, stepfather and their children in Vancouver. “He had his doubts,” she said, “but his mother begged him. He says he’ll visit me on his day off from caddying at the University Golf Course.”

  When Glen came, he and Amy didn’t have much time to visit. The Union Steamship came into the Landing at noon, continued on up the Sound to Seaside Park, and returned to the Landing three hours later to pick up passengers bound for Vancouver.

  For those three hours, no one saw much of Glen and Amy. They pretty much had the Miller house to themselves. Mrs. Miller was spending most of her time with new friends she’d made at Sechelt. The friends had a car and would call for her.

  August brought bad news. Robert Pryce’s wife was being sent to the TB Sanitarium at Tranquille. She’d had TB when she was younger, and recent X-rays showed a large shadow on her left lung. She would need to be at the “San” for at least a year.

  All of this was told to me by Amy, who was waiting for me almost every day when I got off work at 5:00. Bruce still disapproved of her and said so. “Now that she doesn’t have that young boy around, she wants your company,” he said.

  “What does it matter to you?” I said. He had been particularly irritable all week, and I wondered if it was something I’d done, or said.

  “Just warning you, that’s all. I don’t like to see you being used. Your nature’s too trusting.”

  I kept silent.

  “Okay, sorry. Sorry about being so cranky, too. It’s not your fault that I can’t wait to get this surgery over and done with. I want to get on with my life … Go ahead, Meg. Amy’s waiting for you right now. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  One afternoon, when Amy called for me after work, she said, “Just thought I’d walk home with you.” Along the way, she kept sighing and pulling at her hair. A couple of times she started to say something, but broke off abruptly. All the while, her face grew more and more anxious.

  Finally I stopped in the middle of the road and faced her. With autumn coming on, the leaves in the forest behind Amy had started to change colour. Some were as yellow as the sweater she wore. Her eyes were the same shade of blue as the mountains in the background. She had never looked so beautiful — except for the worry lines in her forehead.

  “What’s the matter, Amy? Tell me.”

  “Oh, Meg, I think I’m pregnant.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Does Glen know?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I’m waiting another week before I go to see Dr. Casey. But my period’s already three weeks late, and my breasts are starting to tingle.”

  “Oh, Amy! What are you going to do?”

  “We could get married.”

  “But Glen is going to UBC.”

  “He could still do that. I’ll stay here and finish grade twelve, and he can come up once a week, the way he does now.”

  She counted off on nine fingers. “April. The baby would be due in April. Glen would be finished at UBC by then. We’ll be fine.”

  She made it sound so simple.

  “The kids at school will turn their back on me, though. Meg, you have to promise you’ll stick by me and be my friend.”

  “Of course I will, Amy,” I said. “You know that.” Her face lost some of its tight look.

  The following days dragged. I saw Amy every day, and every day she shook her head. “No period, yet,” she said.

  At the end of the week, she decided it was time to see the doctor. “I’ll go after school,” she said. “I’m nervous, and I want you to come with me. Meg, could you lend me five dollars for the doctor’s visit? I don’t want to ask my mother. She would want to know why. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

  Outside the doctor’s office, Amy asked me to wait. I heard the Lady Alexandra whistle as she left Keats Island. I watched her slowly swing her bow towards Gibson’s Landing. Twenty minutes later, Amy came out with the news.

  “I’m six weeks pregnant,” she said. “Dr. Casey is worried because of my age, and I have to see him every month. Now all I have to do is tell Glen. I can’t wait until he comes up — I’m going to phone him right now.” She sighed. “I’m not sure how he’s going to take it, but …”

  Once we were back at the Landing, we went to the village store, and Amy placed the phone call. She asked for Glen, listened a few minutes, said goodbye and hung up. “His mother says he’s at work,” she said, turning to me. “She’ll have him phone his brother Robert’s house at seven tonight. I’m to be there to receive the call. Come with me. Okay, Meg?” We were at the Pryce house by 6:30. Robert answered the door, and when Amy explained that Glen would be phoning, Robert led us into the living room.

  This was my first time inside the Pryce home. Even though Mrs. Pryce was away in the sanitarium, the room looked tidy and well-cared-for. It was an attractive room with polished dark oak floors, a bright, oval rug in the middle of the living room, a fireplace of huge stones and cedar panelling on the walls. I saw oil paintings and small sculptures. A bookcase lined one wall.

  Amy sank into the nearest large leather armchair. I perched nervously on an unstable rosewood chair upholstered with petit point. I was almost afraid to breathe because Mrs. Pryce’s TB germs probably still lingered in the air. The phone sat mute and black on a teak end table.

  I wondered how Amy would be able to talk privately to Glen with Robert settled in another leather chair nearby. The grandfather clock in the corner started to chime out the hours. “Mr. Pryce,” I said, “may I have a drink of water, please?”

  “The kitchen is at the back of the house,” he said. He settled himself more firmly in his armchair. His eyes didn’t leave Amy.

  “Would you mind showing me, please? I really hate to bother you, Mr. Pryce. But it’s your house and all, and I don’t want to invade your privacy.”

  He looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. Muttering something under his breath, he dragged himself up from the chair and turned towards the rear of the house.

  The phone rang. Robert Pryce froze where he was. He stood listening.

  “Oh, Glen, I’m so glad you phoned,” Amy said. “Well, yes. I’m … well …” She lowered her voice to a whisper, but it was still audible. “I’m pregnant … No, I’m sure, I’ve been to the doctor … Yes … April … When are you coming up? We have to talk.”

  Mr. Pryce turned to me, his face blank. “I think you can find the kitchen yourself,” he said, returning to his armchair.

  “Yes. Thanks,” I said and left a wide space between us as I passed him.

  Tuesday, Sept 5, 1944

  Dear Journal,

  Glen came up last Thursday to see Amy. She seems sublimely confident that everything will work out. I think I’m more worried and upset about her being pregnant than she is. I asked her how she could be so calm, and she said, “I have Rob’s support. He told me so. Said he’d be glad to see me in the family, that they all know I’m not a ‘run-around’ like my mother.”

  Personally, I think that’s an awful thing for Robert Pryce to say. I like Mrs. Miller. She’s kind of silly, but she’s not mean. Besides, who is Robert Pryce to talk about being a “run-around”? I can’t help thinking about Mrs. Ballard.

  I talked to Olive, my brother’s fiancée, about this when I went in to stay with her and her family over Labour Day weekend. She’s a nurse and very nice. So ar
e her whole family. Her sisters plan to be nurses, and I’ve decided that’s what I want to do, too, be a nurse. Olive is understanding and kind. I’d like to be just like her.

  The first day of school, my brother, Dan, and I found a new boy waiting at our bus stop. He wasn’t bad looking: medium height, freckles, sandy hair, blue-green eyes. He said his name was Jack Whalan and that he was in grade twelve. “I live on Gambier Island, but I’m boarding here. The school at Port Mellon nearby only goes up to grade eleven.”

  “Where are you boarding?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Thompson’s. Her son Doug is away in the war, and she misses him, so she answered the school board’s ad for room and board for a student. I don’t have his room, though. She keeps it like a shrine. Pictures of him all over, sport trophies. I think she’s —”

  “You’re lucky to be boarding there,” I interrupted. “She’s a very nice person.”

  He turned away and said to Dan, “I saw a few grouse along the road the other day. Do you ever go shooting?”

  They talked about .22s until the bus came. As soon as we got on the bus, I headed back to where Amy was sitting. She looked white, almost as if she were going to faint.

  “I feel sick,” she said. “But I don’t think I have anything more to throw up.”

  “Here.” I passed her a small package of soda crackers from my lunch kit. “Olive, Sam’s girlfriend, is a nurse, and she says they’ll help. Just eat a couple at a time … Why don’t we move to the front of the bus? Maybe if you sit behind the driver and look straight ahead, you won’t feel so sick.”

  We made it to school without Amy throwing up and walked down the long field to the high school. No amount of white paint could disguise that it had once been a shack in a logging camp. It still sat on its logging skids.

  Mr. Freeman, the principal of both the elementary and high school and who also taught grades 9 to 12, smiled at us as we stepped into the room. Amy left me to talk to her friend, Louise.

  “Ah, you must be Jack,” Mr. Freeman said as the new boy came in the door. “You can take the second seat from the front in the grade twelve row. Meg, show Jack where that is.”

  The grade twelve row was by the windows. I slipped into the seat at the front. Jack sat behind me and opened the top of his desk. I felt him tap on my shoulder, and I looked around.

  “I’m taking a correspondence course in chemistry,” he said. “Mr. Freeman is arranging it. He wants me to have a partner for the lab. Do you want to be my partner?”

  “Well, I took Latin by correspondence last year,” I said. I was silent as I thought of my correspondence instructor who had written on one of the papers, “You are doing very well in this course. What are you planning to do with your knowledge of Latin?”

  “I’d like to be a brain surgeon,” I had written back on my next paper. What an impossible dream. I didn’t even know any women doctors. Nursing would be the closest I could ever get.

  Jack’s words broke into my thoughts. “Hey, you still with me?”

  “Yes. I was thinking about something. I’m thinking of going into nurses’ training when I finish this year. Chemistry would help, wouldn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Mr. Freeman says he is going to make the utility room into a lab.”

  I could see the utility room from where I sat. It was a small, crowded, dingy room with a single window streaked with dirt. “It wouldn’t matter if we blew that place up,” I said. “I saw a rat in there, once.”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  “I guess so.” Bruce would approve. I’d ask Mr. Freeman, at the same time, about universities that might offer scholarships to girls.

  At recess, I looked for Amy but couldn’t see her. I walked up alone to the girls’ washroom in the elementary school. Everyone stopped talking as soon as I went in. They stared at me.

  “So, Meg, your friend’s got herself pregnant,” a grade twelve girl called out. “I bet you hope it’s not catching.”

  I tried to ignore the staring faces and got out of there as soon as I could. An excited buzz of voices followed me out the door.

  I debated whether to tell Amy or not. Though I looked for her, I didn’t see her at lunchtime, or at afternoon recess either. After the last class, I found her waiting at the school bus stop.

  “Where have you been all day?” I said.

  “Lying down in the nurse’s room.”

  I told her what had happened at morning recess.

  “That must have been Louise who spread the news,” Amy said. “I told her this morning, but she promised she wouldn’t tell anyone. I guess you can’t trust anyone, even your best friend.”

  “I didn’t say anything to anyone!”

  “Not you,” Amy said. “I meant Louise.”

  “Oh.”

  As the weeks passed, I noticed a subtle change in the attitude of the other girls. I wasn’t the best softball player, but in the past when teams had been chosen, at least my name had been called about midway through. Now I was the last one picked. If I fumbled a ball, or made it late to a base, the jeers were louder than for anyone else.

  Taunting began. “Friends with Amy! Everyone knows she sleeps around. Hey, Magpie, do you have round heels, too? Are you going to get pregnant next? Who’s the poor jerk you’ve picked to be the father?”

  I think that if Amy had been at school more often instead of staying at home, less might have been said to me. But she was away from school a lot. For the past two weeks, she’d been on bed rest, Dr. Casey’s orders.

  “He says my blood pressure is too high, and my legs are swollen. I’m not allowed to have salt, and I have to take a urine sample to him every week.”

  Mr. Freeman gave me homework to take to Amy, and I delivered it to her every afternoon. Even though she had headaches, she did the work he’d assigned. Not only that, she had started sewing baby clothes by hand. I could hardly believe that she was patient enough to make the tiny stitches.

  The correspondence course in chemistry turned out to be much harder than I’d thought. So much to memorize! It helped to have Jack as my partner — he seemed to know everything. The makeshift lab in the utility room was too small, and we kept bumping into each other. Each time we did, I found I reacted physically to him. The hardness of his body caused strange stirrings in the pit of my stomach. This must be what Amy feels with Glen, I thought. Though I didn’t especially like Jack, every time I looked at him, excitement flushed through my body. I’d felt this before with Glen and Bruce.

  One late fall day when the maple tree outside our lab window had dropped the last of its golden leaves, Jack said, “Would you like to go to the Halloween dance with me? I’ve asked around about you. I hear good things. My landlady Mrs. Thompson says you were kind to her son Doug and wrote to him when he joined the Army. The kids here think you’re smart and a hard worker. But,” and his voice harshened, “it’s too bad you’re friends with that girl.”

  “That girl?”

  “The one who’s in the family way.”

  “Are you talking about Amy?”

  “It makes you look bad. You know, to choose her for a friend.”

  “About the dance. Thanks for asking, but no. The answer is no.”

  His pupils grew big with surprise. “Because of what I said about your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you’ll think about it. It would be fun.”

  I looked at the clock on the classroom wall. “I’ve got to go. I’ll leave you to wash out the test tubes.”

  “But you always wash the test tubes!”

  “From now on, we’re taking turns.”

  Chapter Eleven

  After I’d picked up the mail later that afternoon, I saw Bruce burning leaves at the beach in front of the guest house. The air was sweet with their incense. An October sky of brilliant blue vaulted over the calm ocean. Out on the water, an outboard thrummed its way towards the open Gap.

  Bruce looked up from the pile of leaves he was forking into t
he flames. We’d seen each other every Saturday when I’d gone to help Mrs. Hanson, and I’d already told him about taking chemistry. “Great!” he’d said. This time, I wanted to talk to him about Jack and what he’d said about Amy.

  “I know you say I need to be careful not to let Amy, or anyone, use me.” I took a long stick and turned a pile of smoldering leaves until it flared again. “I don’t think what Jack says is the same thing.”

  “Let’s talk a minute,” Bruce said, and we left the fire and sat on a nearby log. I brushed some ashes from his grey sweater. I noticed it was beginning to unravel at both cuffs.

  “Of course, it’s different,” he said. “We’re talking about loyalty. Loyalty is good. Your sense of loyalty is one of the things I like about you.”

  “Oh … What else do you like?”

  He laughed. “Oh, that you found the cameo that belonged to one of the guests and gave it back to her. You could have kept it for yourself … Back to loyalty. It’s not that common, I’ve found.”

  Was he thinking of his fiancée, who had called off the engagement after he’d been burned?

  “I know how much you like to dance, Meg, and I’ll bet this boy will ask you again. Say ‘yes.’ Go. Have a good time. It’s a way of getting to know boys, men, so that later, when you decide to get married, you’ll know what kind of man you want.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “So you do want to get married?”

  “Oh, sometime, I guess.”

  “And have children?”

  “I’m in no hurry,” I said.

  “I’d ask you to go to the Halloween dance with me — I want to dance with you again — but I never know when I’m going to get a phone call from the hospital to go in for my last skin graft. It’s supposed to be soon.”

  I liked the way he was looking at me, as if I gave him pleasure. Now the tingling sensations were back in my body again. So it wasn’t just being bumped into by Jack in the small lab. I was growing up, and for the first time I felt more excited than scared.