Nothing.
The cat is meowing. Suzanne runs down the hall to the telephone table. She remembers the numbers and watches the dial spinning slowly, too slowly, around each time.
Three rings. Four. And on the fifth ring, her father’s voice.
“Come! Help!” she says, her eyes on the hallway.
The ambulance arrives with Suzanne’s parents. Her father looks funny in his casual trousers and pyjama top. Her mother has her hair in curlers beneath a printed scarf. She pulls Suzanne to her in a gesture that is somewhere between fear and anger. The stretcher is sliding down the hall now. Suzanne closes her eyes.
“Is it?” her mother asks. “Is she?”
The ambulance attendant looks up. “Where’s the girl?”
She is hiding behind her mother.
“Fire Engine Sue, you came just in time. Diabetic coma,” he adds, nodding to Mrs. Cardinal.
Suzanne rides home in the car. They have not told her. Does this mean Mrs. Reidel will live? They have not said anything about how she crept out of her home and crawled into the window of Mrs. Reidel’s house. They have not scolded her for the rip in her brand new, green Sunday dress that she is wearing on Saturday to go to the city. Suzanne flicks open the miniature metal ashtray in the back seat armrest and studies the ledge, where a cigarette gets to sit and watch the world of ash below.
Aunt Sophie’s house is in a residential section of the city, but buses at the end of the street can take them anywhere they want to go. The library, which is a giant grown-up version of Mrs. Craig’s library back home, has more children’s books than Suzanne has ever seen before. How can a child read so many books? And there is the ice cream parlour with dozens of flavours, and the spruce doggie on the corner, a sad-looking terrier who seems to live beneath the spruce tree. Aunt Sophie tells Suzanne that she has never seen the dog anywhere but under that tree.
“It’s his tree house,” Suzanne replies.
Sophie Marsala has been widowed almost a year. Vince was her second husband, and both husbands succumbed to heart attacks.
“Maybe it’s Sophie’s cooking,” Suzanne’s father joked at the table soon after Vince died.
Suzanne’s eyes widen as she remembers this. Aunt Sophie is passing her a plate of spaghetti. She is hungry. Didn’t her stomach rumble all the way home on the bus? The meatballs are small and perfectly round. The sauce looks okay. What about that sprinkle of cheese? Suzanne knows how Alice felt wondering which drink she wasn’t supposed to eat or drink. But this isn’t Wonderland, and Suzanne says a little prayer to Jesus to save her from poison meatballs then digs in.
Nothing.
Tasty.
Suzanne smiles at her aunt, now cutting poison bread and pouring poison milk. There. They click glasses, Suzanne’s milk spills onto her spaghetti, and they both laugh.
Unlike Suzanne’s mother’s hair, Aunt Sophie’s is long and wound up in a bun. There is grey hair and black hair mixed together. Suzanne likes how the hair moves like a wave when she undoes it.
Aunt Sophie combs out Suzanne’s tangles, too, and they sit side by side, looking into the mirror.
“Tell me, Little Sue, what does the future hold for your old aunt?”
She is only a little bit joking, for she has stopped combing and is staring right at her reflection.
But of course, this is not how it goes. Suzanne can no more say what will become of Aunt Sophie than she can say what will become of Suzanne.
“Did you know . . . did you know about Uncle Vince?”
There is a look on Aunt Sophie’s face. She holds the comb strangely. Suzanne closes her eyes for a moment and shivers. When she opens them, Aunt Sophie is dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
Adele calls to see how they are getting on. Suzanne tells her mother that Aunt Sophie is the cheerfullest person she knows. Then Adele talks to Sophie. Suzanne cannot understand the half-conversation, so she goes out back to see the worms. Even though this is the city, there are piles of earth here and there in the yard. There is one pile that Aunt Sophie says used to belong to a tree. The tree was removed, but the earth stayed, and now Suzanne can visit the worms there.
“Worthworms,” she says at supper that evening.
Aunt Sophie looks up from her plate. “You mean earthworms?”
“Worthworms. They’re really hard workers. They’re worth a lot.”
Aunt Sophie wants to give Suzanne a kitten. “Something to love,” she explains to Adele. Something to keep her busy? Better a dog, then, to romp with through the woods. A cat will sit and stare and not allow itself to be played with by a schoolgirl who speaks to bullfrogs. It will not be a pet.
“You know, a pet!” Sophie pleads.
But where is Little Sue? Why is she not begging and carrying on as children are supposed to when the issue of small animals is raised? Why is it Sophie who whimpers and grovels?
Little Sue is in Aunt Sophie’s backyard talking to the worms.
“Really, Adele, a cat or a dog. Right away.”
Soon, however, the summer is over. The cool evening breezes of August brush the tiny hairs on Suzanne’s arms and tell her soon. Soon. Snow.
It is so cold one evening that Aunt Sophie lights a fire in the fireplace. Suzanne breathes deep. Burning wood. Clean wood, not like the smell of her house when it was in flames. Soon she will leave and return to town for school. She will be in Grade Two. She will find her tunic and slip it over her head. Will it fit? She holds out her arms. She can never see herself growing, but they tell her she is.
She must see Charlie Donaldson. She must tell him about the train bridge.
“Mommy?” The phone is heavy.
Suzanne hears the sigh in her mother’s voice. “What is it? You have two days left with your aunt.”
“Mommy? Could you tell Charlie Donaldson not to go on the train bridge? He likes to go on the train bridge with his brother, and he can’t, okay?”
This is not what parents should have to put up with. Adele has her monthly pains and has already flown off the handle at work today. She does not need this kind of nonsense. So she reassures the child, hangs up the phone and goes to lie down on the couch.
Suzanne does a jigsaw puzzle with Aunt Sophie. A clown in a little racing car, with a monkey balancing on his head.
“I have the monkey’s wave!” Suzanne cries.
While on a trestle, in the setting sun, Charlie Donaldson dies.
Time passes, blue trickles in the stream. Except that when Suzanne holds the water in her hand, it is clear. She wonders about water, how far it travels, not only downstream but up into the air and down again. They are learning that in school. It never disappears, not really; it just becomes something else.
Mrs. Reidel is in a wheelchair, and her flowers are dusty. Suzanne has given up pulling weeds and spends the afternoons practicing her reading with Mrs. Reidel. The woman seems so much older, although it has only been months since the summer. She likes to hear Little Sue read, or so she says. They both like The Snow Queen. Mrs. Reidel says she knew someone once whose heart was frozen like Kay’s was in the story.
“Did the boy have a Gerda?” A little girl to search for him, to find him and melt his frozen heart?
Mrs.