Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

knew that if she stayed a few days more June really would make an effort to show her the city, even though she had seen it before. She would be taken up the chairlift, driven through the parks, taken to look at totem poles.
    “You must come for a real visit,” said June.
    “I haven’t helped you the way I meant to,” Eileen said. No sooner was that sentence out than it flung itself inside out and grinned at her. This was a day when there was nothing she could say that would work.
    “I always pack more than I need.”
    June sat on the bed. “He was not killed in the accident, you know.”
    “Not killed?”
    “Not in the actual crash. It couldn’t have been too bad, really. Those other kids were just scratched up. He was dazed, probably. I think he was probably dazed. He climbed out of the car, they all did. The car was at a very strange angle on the roadbank. You see it had sort of climbed the bank and it was on its side, it must have been on its side, like this”—June set one hand, the fingers spread and slightly trembling, on top of the other—“but on a corner, too, sort of—tilted. I don’t really understand how it could have been. I try to picture it but I really can’t. I mean I can’t understand the angle it must have been at and how it could have been high enough. It fell on him. The car just—it fell on him, and he was killed. I don’t know how he was standing. Or maybe he was not standing. You know, he may have—crawled out and been trying to get up. But I can’t really understand how. Can you picture it?”
    “No,” said Eileen.
    “I can’t either.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “One of the boys who—one of the other boys told his mother and she told me.”
    “Maybe that was cruel.”
    “Oh, no,” said June in a thoughtful voice. “No. I don’t think so. You do want to know.”
    In the mirror over the dresser Eileen could see her sister’s face, the downward profile, which was waiting, perhaps embarrassed, now that this offering had been made. Also her own face, surprising her with its wonderfully appropriate look of tactfulness and concern. She felt cold and tired, she wanted mostly to get away. It was an effort to put her hand out. Acts done without faith may restore faith. She believed, with whatever energy she could summon at the moment, she had to believe and hope that was true.

The Ottawa Valley
    I think of my mother sometimes in department stores. I don’t know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson’s disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in the Ottawa Valley.
    A cousin she was planning to meet, for a between-trains visit, did not show up. “She probably couldn’t get away,” said my mother, sitting in a leather chair in the darkly paneled Ladies’ Lounge, which is now boarded up. “There was probably something to do that she couldn’t leave to anybody else.” This cousin was a legal secretary, and she worked for a senior partner in what my mother always called, in her categorical way, “the city’s leading law firm.” Once she had come to visit us, wearing a large black hat and a black suit, her lips and nails like rubies. She did not bring her husband. He was an alcoholic. My mother always mentioned that her husband was an alcoholic, immediately after she had stated that she held an important job with the city’s leading law firm. The two things were seen to balance each other, to be tied together in some inevitable and foreboding way. In the same way my mother would say of a family we knew that they had everything money could buy but their only son was an epileptic, or that the parents of the only person from our town who had become moderately famous, a pianist named Mary Renwick, had said that they would give all their daughter’s fame for a pair of baby hands. A pair of baby hands? Luck was not without its shadow, in her universe.
    My sister and I went out into the station which was like a street with its lighted shops and like a church with its high curved roof and great windows at each end. It was full of the thunder of trains hidden, it seemed,