Issue 153 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Years later, when someone asks Margaret the name of her first love, she thinks for a minute and then tells them Jordie MacKenzie, a boyfriend she had in Grade Five. Her long-reaching memory might lead you to believe - and you'd be right in this - that Margaret falls hard, and started falling early. But Jordie is also burned into her mind the same way many others have been made immortal: He disappeared so fast there was no time for disillusionment.

When someone - it is, in fact, her daughter, a girl as skinny and freckled as Margaret used to be - asks for a description, the picture comes in pieces. Jordie had dimples. Shiny black hair with a cowlick. And a funny way of shrugging with one shoulder, coming into a room. Her daughter, perched on the breakfast stool and leaning forward precariously, wants to know more. But Margaret saves, just for herself, a sudden clear memory of the white of Jordie's throat. How he'd throw back his head and laugh loud and long. How he'd whip around the schoolyard like a colt who refused to be broken. Jordie MacKenzie. A boy who might have chased her with a grass snake if there'd been any snakes, or for that matter any grass, in Keele Street schoolyard. Instead, she remembers the constant grey concrete under foot, and ball, and skipping rope, and the sun-warmed red brick of the looming old school.

On one of their first days in Toronto, a stifling August day when they were still in the hotel downtown, her parents drove her by to take a look at it. "What do you think?" her father pointed out the window, while she hugged her knees up and rocked back and forth on the hot leatherette. "It looks haunted," she told him, and she said so later, to Jordie, when the two of them were sitting on the stone wall by the GIRLS entrance one day.

"You're haunted," he shot back. "Got cobwebs in your head." She swatted him, and he leapt to his feet, pulled a long sewing needle out of his pocket and jabbed it around in the air in front of her. A buccaneer wielding a miniature sword. "See what I scoffed from my mom?" he said, shifting back into place on the wall. Then, sliding the needle through the outer layers of skin, he carefully stitched his middle two fingers together.

Jordie MacKenzie sat one row over and a few seats in front of Margaret Dempster in Mrs. Boyle's Grade Five class. The first day of school, Margaret sat alone amidst the roar of conversation, hoping the tips of her ears weren't sticking out like little mouse ears through her thin, straight hair. She fiddled with the zipper on her pencil case, a new one her mother had bought her, their first trip to Eaton's on Queen Street. She thought of the Beatles in matching grey suits, beaming up from the counter; her mother, bound for Draperies, suddenly pausing in the aisle. "Margaret," she'd said, "you've never asked for any of this. Is there something you'd like?" And Margaret had reached for the pencil case which, now, she was longing to open, to inhale once more the newness of the plastic, and look at her pencils, neat and sharp.

Mrs. Boyle came in and the buzz of conversation faded. A black-haired boy tossed one final spitball over his shoulder, and soon there was only the pointer-sharp tapping of heels on the floor. She opened her ledger and said she'd be calling each pupil - a word Margaret hated, it sounded like something that smelled bad - to the front of the room to answer a question. This way, she'd find out who they were, and what they knew.

"You're a new girl," she noted when Margaret's turn came. She smiled and Margaret smiled back gamely; she was good at answering questions.

"We'll give you an easy one." Mrs. Boyle paused, considering. "Name the five Great Lakes."

" ... great lakes?"

"Yes. The five Great Lakes." She was pretty, with dark blue eyes and frosted lipstick. Not strict-looking like some of the older, thin-lipped teachers Margaret had seen in the hall.

"I don't ... "

Mrs. Boyle made a tsk-ing sound. "You can start with just one."

Margaret shook her head helplessly.

"What school did you go to last year?"

"Ardmore -"

"- where?"

"Ardmore School. It's in ... Halifax?"

"Well," Mrs. Boyle turned to the class and held her palms up, "it appears that where Margaret comes from, they don't teach the Great Lakes in Grade Four. Will somebody volunteer an answer?"

A roomful of hands shot up. Huron. Michigan. Mrs. Boyle jotted something in her ledger book. Erie. Superior. Looked at Margaret sharply. Ontario. Waved her away.

Margaret starts to tidy up - she runs a catering business from home, and has a client coming later in the morning - when she notices a Hilroy scribbler, left behind on the table. She scoops it up and swings the back door open, but her daughter has disappeared into the lane.

She looks at the scribbler. It's science - the Grade Fours are studying birds this month - and Amber has drawn an eagle with a proud hooked beak, but an impossibly small wingspan, coming in for a landing just above her name. The mix of clumsiness and precision puts Margaret in mind of a much younger version of her daughter, one who'd grown indignant because birds could fly - and we could not. It isn't fair, she'd kept insisting, unable to conceive that in the big scheme of things, an unfair situation would be allowed.

It occurred to Margaret then, and it's one of those thoughts that's stayed with her, that the real loss of innocence has nothing to do with sex. The real loss of innocence comes when you accept the fact that life's not fair. She lets the door swing shut behind her. If you're reasonably lucky, she figures, like she's been, you may not learn the worst of it first hand.

As she wipes down the counters in her rambling old kitchen, she thinks of her mother in the sleek but tiny galley kitchen of Apartment 1003. That's where she was, unpacking the last of the dishes, when Margaret arrived home that day from school. Aunt Evelyn was behind her in the dining area, ripping open yet another box marked DELICATE - THIS WAY UP. The balcony door was tied open, and the new drapes from Eaton's were rustling like old-fashioned skirts.

"How did it go?" both women spoke in unison. Evelyn laughed, and Margaret's mother, although she had a tight, tired look around her mouth that day, gave a snort of laughter too. Margaret looked at the two of them, both with the warm brown eyes people said she had inherited; and the thick chestnut hair that she had not. Her aunt's was teased into a beehive, with what she called a "kiss-curl" on each cheek, while her mother's, in a looser, more housewifely style, looked unruly just then - a hair clip dangling, irritatingly, above one eye. Grown-up they were, and so sure of themselves. Safe from the first day of school.

"It was okay, I guess," she mumbled. "What's for lunch?" Her mother reached into the cupboard.

Evelyn swiped her palms together, smoothed her tight cotton skirt and put the kettle on. "What's your teacher like?" she asked, and Margaret rolled her eyes. When she'd learned that her father's bank was moving them to Toronto, only two thoughts had brought comfort: six tv stations, and Ev. Summertime, at her grandparents' house on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, it was Ev, home on holiday, who'd go to the beach or play rounds of Old Maid. With her steady stream of boyfriends, she didn't seem to mind Jack Dempster teasing that she really was an old maid. But today, Margaret scowled at her well-meaning questions.

"Any cute boys in your room?"

"It's a class, not a room," she said. "How come you're not at work?"

Her mother turned from the counter, where she was slathering peanut butter onto a slice of bread, but Evelyn just shrugged. "Night shift this week," she said, and lay her arm on Margaret's shoulder. Margaret let herself be drawn in: spicy perfume, clean sweat, slopes of breast and belly. For a minute, she could almost hear the oily squawking of gulls, and the breeze blowing in through the 10th-storey windows could have been the salty wind that blew from the Atlantic.

When the kettle started whistling, Evelyn pulled away to get it. Margaret leaned against the cool fridge door. She sank her teeth into the familiar sponginess of peanut butter on soft white bread, and studied her mother and aunt. Evelyn looked jaunty, even from the back, with the long shapely calves of her legs; the sleeves of her black jersey pushed up to the elbows. Margaret's mother had the same trim figure, but a smaller, limper version. As if some of the air had been let out of her. Their shoulders brushed together as they worked, unpacking dishes; and when a cup slipped from her mother's hand by accident, Evelyn caught it, not missing a beat.

Helen Dempster used to step onto the balcony and shake her dustmop into the sky above Toronto. Above Mountview Drive. Despite the name, there wasn't a mountain to view from there, not even from a tenth-floor balcony. Instead, she looked down upon rows of brick houses, all of them old, punctuated now and then by new, white columns of apartments such as hers. The houses on whose roofs her dust would settle were comfortable High Park houses - most of them pricey, even then. But she found them dull in their sameness. Not like the painted wooden buildings, home.

If she had stood on the balcony that brisk September lunch hour, her eyes would have followed a small, thin figure making its way for the second time to Keele Street School. A flick of dark hair in the wind. And a high-stepping walk that had no precedent in the family, but was Margaret's alone. Straight-backed and springy. A barely contained majorette.

Helen would have smiled to see another figure in a skirt - they'd be so far away by then, that's all she'd have been able to distinguish - come out of one of the houses and start walking along beside Margaret. Her name, she would soon learn, was Anna Maria Novelli. A soft-spoken girl who wore a lot of jewellery and played the violin. She would later find out that another girl had moved away that summer, making an opening for the world's most propitious meeting - a new girl, and a girl who needs a new best friend.

Margaret and Anna Maria were just coming up to the school gates when a boy hollered, "Wait up!" They turned. It was the black-haired boy. "I've got a cousin in Halifax," he said, falling into step with Margaret. "You guys might of went to the same school."

Later on, as the days turned cool, Margaret would wait at the corner, scraping her foot through piles of crispy leaves while she looked one way for the first glimpse of Jordie's plaid jacket; the other for Anna Maria's green beret. Once, when she and Jordie were waiting there together, he held out something small and furry, dangling from a chain.

She looked at him blankly.

"It's a rabbit's foot," he said. "Don't you know anything?"

"I've never seen one before, okay? What happened to the rabbit?"

"What a stupid question!" he crowed. "Rabbit stew, I would imagine. I won it at the Ex."

"It's pretty. It's ... green."

"Yeah, they dye them all different colours. They're supposed to be good luck." He kicked at some leaves. "I've got a purple one at home too," he said. "You could have this one. If you want, you know."

She held out her hand and he laid the rabbit's foot in it. It was so soft, she flinched in surprise. "It's like feathers," she told him. "Hey? Thanks."

He shrugged: "It's no big deal."

But a few days later, she wondered if the rabbit's foot had brought good luck. She and Milvi Solarski were standing at side-by-side sinks, pumping pink liquid soap into their cupped palms. It had the same strong perfume and plasticky texture as the soap at her old school in Halifax, and the sign on the wall was the same, too: Girls, this is your washroom. Please help to keep it clean. On a nearby shelf were two small square envelopes.

"It's gonna be so-o go-od!" Milvi's well-soaped palms squished. "Did Anna Maria get invited too?"

"Yeah."

"So did Amy Lem. And Jenny."

Margaret was staring into the mirror, noticing how her brown eyes sparkled.

"Lillian says we'll be bobbing for apples" - Milvi cranked out a sheet of paper towel - "since her birthday's so close after Hallowe'en."

Margaret nodded, and her hair swung forward. It felt whispery against her cheeks, like silky curtains. She noticed that the tiles reflected from the wall behind her were the same as in Halifax too ... or were they? Halifax was starting to go fuzzy. The words here, like "running shoes" instead of "sneakers," and "notebook" for "scribbler," were words she'd learned fast so she wouldn't be laughed at. They'd felt odd on her tongue the first few weeks. They felt natural now. Maybe she'd only imagined the same sign, the same strong pink soap.

She looked into her eyes again and shook her hair back, gripping the sink for balance. Then she dried her hands with unusual care on the rough paper towel and reached for her invitation from Lillian, the most popular girl in Grade Five. When she tucked it into the pocket of her jumper, her fingers brushed against the rabbit's foot. She stroked it. "Thanks," she whispered.

"What?" asked Milvi.

"Oh, nothing," she said, and they rushed down the hallway to Art.

Later, she'd try to remember the feeling that came over her as she sped along the polished floor. Sort of like floating. Who'd have believed this would happen to her, Margaret Dempster, a bit of nobody really, if the truth were known, from Ardmore School. The art room was laid out in tables of six; you could sit where you liked. She glided in, fingering the envelope in her pocket, just as Peter Brownmiller, a shuffling, flushed-looking boy, sat down between Jordie and Anna Maria - the only seat left at their table. She acted swiftly, still walking on air. She made a sweep with her hand and Peter's books and pencil case went crashing to the floor.

He whirled around. "Hey! What the heck -?" He got up to retrieve them and she slid into his chair.

"Give me my seat back." His pencil case was wooden, with neat little slats that rolled open like in her grandfather's old roll-top desk on the Shore. He was clutching it, crouching beside her. "I said give it back," his voice rose, and some of the kids turned to look. The room was dreadfully quiet.

"Go sit someplace else, Peter," said Jordie.

"No friggin' way." Peter's face was even blotchier than usual. Miss Aucoin, the art teacher, was coming through the door.

"Beat it," Jordie said, and Peter stood then and started to go. He didn't look angry. He looked stung, as if he'd been slapped.

Margaret reached across the table to the tray of magic markers. They were working on Hallowe'en projects that day, and hers was a skeleton with jointed arms and legs. When she took it home her father hung it in the window, though she asked him not to bother. Really, she tried to explain to him, no one would see it ten floors up.

After eight years in the classroom, Stephanie Boyle wasn't surprised at the hum of excitement that swept through the aisles on the first day of snow. She opened her ledger and started the roll call, going back to front as she did sometimes. Her concession to the Vincer boy, with his protests that the alphabet was "wrong."

"Sophie Wolosczuk?" she began, and a thin arm went up.

"Chad Vincer?" A smile that showed the gap between his two front teeth.

"Wilson Tan?" ... "Milvi Solarski?" Outside, the snow was gaining speed and density. "Anna Maria Novelli?"

"Here Miss." A jangling of bracelets as a dark hand was raised.

"It's Mrs.," she corrected her. Not for the first time. Anna Marie was quite sweet, really, but there was something about her that grated. All that jewellery, and pierced ears on a girl so young. After all, they were in Canada now.

"Theo Megas?"

"Here, Mrs.," he said, and there was tittering around the room.

A taste of something sour. "Jordie MacKenzie?" A handsome boy, but unruly. He was gawking out the window now, likely thinking about that scrawny little Maritime girl. It had to be the strongest case of puppy love she'd seen. "Mr. MacKenzie?" she repeated, "are you with us?" He blushed and ducked his head in a way that reminded her, suddenly, of his mother - a bulky, pink-cheeked woman who, now that she thought of it, spoke with what seemed like a Maritime accent when she turned up on parent-teacher nights. And she'd been turning up for years now, as there seemed to be no end to MacKenzie offspring. A big, shabby brood. Roman Catholic, she guessed.

"Margaret Dempster?"

The girl was staring at the snowfall, but her hand shot up, all perky. After the first going off, she'd turned out to be bright. Perhaps it was some kind of Maritime sticking-together, this thing between the Dempster girl and the MacKenzie boy. There were some who would do that - stick together - while others, well, they'd move right in anywhere. A little too sure of themselves, she believed.

" ... Peter Czerniawski?" ... "Amy Chin?" ... "Peter Brownmiller?" The clumsy boy seemed to have dropped a pile of papers on the floor, and he was down on his hands and knees collecting them. His shirt had pulled out of his trousers on one side, exposing a roll of pale skin.

"Here I am, Mrs.," he puffed at her, and she said, "That's good to know, Peter. We miss you so much when you're away." Once more, there was a round of laughter. Where it belonged now: in the palm of her hand.

If she had looked around the room she would have noticed a few students not joining in. Among them, Margaret Dempster. Peter was now in his seat, his head hanging, and Margaret's eyes were lowered too, fixed on the back of Peter's neck, on the line where his broad, fleshy neck met the collar of his light blue shirt. Someone had bought that shirt for Peter, she was thinking, the way her mother sometimes brought things home for her. Someone who loved him had picked it out carefully, thinking perhaps that he'd wear it at school. While he played with his friends.

By 3:00, the fine, white snow had changed in form and colour. "Get lost!" Anna Maria yelled. Chad Vincer had plastered the side of her face with a slushball. Margaret became aware of thudding footsteps behind her. She tried to run, but wasn't fast enough to get away from Jordie, who grabbed the hood of her coat and started heaping it with snow. She tripped him and ran the whole length of the schoolyard with her heavy book bag lurching to one side. She nearly crashed into the wall that divided the playground from the parking lot beyond it. Latching on for support, she slid behind the wall and came face to face with Jordie, coasting in from the other end. Puffs of steam were pouring out of their mouths into the icy air; they were like dragon children. "Give me a kiss," he said. "No one can see."

The shortcut took them through an alley, and between some loose pickets under a faded No Trespassing sign. Spots of something that looked like grease appeared on Margaret's mittens after she pulled herself through. She tried to rub them clean on a bare patch of fence but the spots only blurred and got bigger.

"Hurry up!" Jordie called, and what sounded like a big mad dog began to bark. Margaret heard, or imagined, the rattling and snapping taut of a heavy chain.

Jordie barked back. "Ah-ooooo, ah-ooooo," he howled. He clambered up a stack of crates to the top of another fence, and disappeared over it. "Come on!" his voice rang up to her. "What are you waiting for?"

"Do me a favour," she said when they were back on the sidewalk. Back on the nice, straight border of things. "Next time you want to take me on a shortcut - don't." She was holding her hands out so her mittens wouldn't touch her coat.

Jordie chuckled.

"Something funny?"

"No" - but with a little spurt of laughter - "well, it's just the way you're walking - "

She turned to him - "what?"

"You look like you're on parade, the way you always" - another laugh burst out - "and with your arms like that -" she stormed ahead, and his voice trailed off.

"Hey," he called, "I like the way you do stuff." He caught up with her. "I like it, all right?"

After a minute he peeked over her shoulder at the mittens, and whistled. "Are you gonna get in trouble?"

"Probably," she said. "They're new."

"Shit," he said sympathetically. "Deep shit."

She followed him across the street. On this block the houses were narrow, and mostly joined in rows. "Are we getting close?" she asked him.

"Yup," he said, turning up the walkway to a house with a chipped wooden door. "We're here."

Margaret had a game that she'd invented on the highway between Halifax and Toronto, pretending the grills of the oncoming cars were their faces; some smiling, and others with grimacing mouths. Since then she'd been reading the faces of houses as well, and Jordie's, with one narrow window on the bottom and two little square ones on top, seemed to be gaping, its mouth dropping open in surprise. A few doors down, Peter Brownmiller was sweeping a thin coat of snow from the step.

"Does he live there?" she said. "You never told me. Peter!" she called, "Hi!"

He shrugged, almost imperceptibly. Be that way then, she thought, and turned to Jordie's window, which was crawling with vines and hairy leaves, and in the middle of it all a big, spiky cactus with drooping red blooms.

Inside, she slung her coat on top of Jordie's on the overburdened hall tree, and stuffed her mittens behind a big pair of workboots. She yanked up her lumpy beige leotards when Jordie wasn't looking, and followed him down the hallway to the kitchen. A soupy smell, like ham bone, was rolling in clouds from a pot on the stove, its lid dancing, while a thin whiff of beauty parlor floated from the table. A teenage girl with long wet hair was dipping her finger into a jar of green bubbles. Dippity-Do. She was wearing nylon stockings which she seemed to be admiring - crossing, uncrossing, and idly swinging a leg. A slightly younger girl knelt on a chair behind her, closing in with a curler in one hand and in the other a metal-toothed comb.

"Don't poke me," the older girl snapped.

"Well then quit jiggling!"

Jordie cleared his throat. He put the flat of his hand between Margaret's shoulder blades and pushed her forward. "S'Margaret," he announced. "S'Laura ... Tanya ... s'my mom."

His mother turned from the stove. She was a big-boned woman with a heart-shaped face and skin that looked pinkish, perhaps from the steam. Her hair was black and heavy, with grey strands, and was pulled into a bun. She rubbed between her eyebrows with a fingertip as if rubbing at a headache. "Margaret," she said. "The girl from Halifax."

Margaret nodded. She couldn't think of anything to say.

Mrs. MacKenzie smiled at her. "Jordan talks a lot about you." From behind her, Margaret heard a groan.

A toddler in diapers and a droopy t-shirt marched into the room, her bare feet slapping on the patched linoleum, and climbed onto a chair at the table. Then came Jordie's brother Michael, who was also at Keele, in Grade Three. The last time she had seen him, he'd been chanting in the schoolyard, loud and bratty:

First comes love, then comes marriage,

Then comes Margaret with a ba-by carriage.

Mrs. MacKenzie reached to the fridge-top, felt around and pulled down a pack of Export A's. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over one of those loose cotton shifts that women ordered from the catalogue. Housedresses, they called them. For days when they weren't going out. Margaret's mother wore them too, but Mrs. MacKenzie fit into hers much differently. She had large breasts that shifted like sacks when she moved.

"Sit down, Margaret," she said, "if you can find a place," and the toddler, whose shirt had slipped down to expose one plump shoulder, pointed at Margaret and frowned. "Ast-nawt Margit!" she declared, and the rest of them burst out laughing. The oldest girl, Tanya, brushed a clump of wet bangs from her eyes. "Not Aunt Margaret, silly," she said.

The little girl kept staring while she took this in. "Oh," she said finally, "nud-der kinda Mar-git." She turned her attention to a tower she was building from the curlers that were scattered on the table. The fourth or fifth one toppled it. "Aw ... faw ... down!"

A blob of red paint for Santa's hat dripped from the brush and landed beneath his eye like a bloody tear. Margaret caught it with a bit of kleenex and managed to smooth it into a rosy cheek. She made a matching one for the other side, smiling to herself as she remembered a Santa Claus Jordie had drawn, with a grin and fangs - "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good bite!"

She was standing at the sink when Peter Brownmiller sidled up to her.

"What are you painting for the mural?" she asked, smiling brightly, but he didn't let on he'd heard.

"Bet you don't know why your boyfriend isn't in school," he said.

"I don't have a boyfriend." She kept rinsing her brush until the water ran clear.

"Right," said Peter. "I hate to tell you this," he leaned closer, "but he isn't coming back. Not ever."

"Will you get outta here."

"Sure."

"Peter?"

He pivoted back. "They packed up and left on the weekend," he told her, "after what happened."

"What are you talking about?"

"What I'm talking about," he whispered, "is that his mother's dead. And I know all about it. I heard my mother on the phone ..."

"Mar-garet!"

"Sorry, Mom." She stepped back to the door, pulled her boots off and placed them on the rubber mat. Her mother was standing in the dining area, where the table was laden with ribbons and paper and parcels. The last gifts going home to Nova Scotia. She held up a package with string looped around it. "Come hold your finger on the knot," she said, and Margaret managed, as always, to nick it away just in time. Her mother picked up the big kitchen scissors to cut off the excess.

"Mommy?" the words began slowly; then poured out. "Peter Brownmiller? He told me that Jordie's ... gone. His mother ... she was going to have a baby, he said, and she didn't want to? Peter, he must be lying. He said Jordie's aunt, that his aunt and his mother, that they tried to do something -"

They both jumped when the scissors clattered to the table. There was a resounding clang. Margaret tugged her mother's sleeve the way a toddler would, looking up at her and waiting to be told it can't be true.

Later, walking past her parents' room, she saw her mother at the window, staring down. You had to stand up close like that if you wanted to actually see anything, and Margaret went in and stood beside her, both of them watching the cars and buses edging through the slushy streets below. They looked like toys, of course, from so far up, and Margaret wondered: Did her mother also play that game where you followed a car with your eyes and tried to will it where to go? Mostly the cars did not cooperate, but it always seemed worth one more try. Eventually as the sky got darker the outside world became hard to distinguish and what they could make out, most clearly, were their own faces staring back. Margaret's was thin, her dark eyes glistening, and her mother's face above her, pale and necessary, like the moon.

Margaret checks the time. She gathers up some papers and slides them in between the balusters at the bottom of the stairs. The "take-it-with-you step," as Amber calls it. The scribbler flips over and she can't help but notice, in one comer, a heart with Cupid's arrow going through. As of yet, no name filled in.

It was 1965, Margaret counts back the years. The Beatles wore matching grey suits to beam up from department store counters. A girl could approach adolescence - perhaps in some cases get through it - without being certain how babies were made. Margaret's mother did her best that day to give her the facts of a death, without exposing many of the facts of life. She doesn't remember what was said exactly - just her own question, "Why would God give her a baby if she didn't want one?" It must have presented a challenge, she thinks.

All she knows for certain is she never heard of Jordie or his family again, except the time, a few nights later, when her father read some of it out from the newspaper: " ... Margaret Jane Slaunwhite, the dead woman's sister, will stand trial."

She and her father used to walk to the Runnymede Library, several blocks away. Just after supper one evening, weeks or months later when the days were getting long, they varied their usual route and took a different sidestreet. The air was crisp and still. A fresh crust of what people were calling, with hope in their voices, the last snow of the season, made a satisfying crunch beneath their feet. The streetlights flicked on, and it gave the brick houses a rose-coloured glow. Margaret turned to her father to say something about how beautiful everything was. Then she realized they were on Jordie's old street, just coming up to his house. The lights were on, and a bottom curtain open. She could see a stretch of chalky wall, a dangling bulb, and bits of other people's pictures. The plants were all gone from the window, but the house had the chipped wooden door she remembered. The same startled face.