Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

While gridlocked in the churchyard of a small Irish town, the traffic frozen in place for the funeral of a young mother and her infant, an unbidden thought comes to Frances Moon. "I lost a baby when I was nineteen." She is surprised by how easily the long-suppressed memory slips into her consciousness, and by her own voice as she speaks the thought aloud to Ian, her partner of twenty years.


The next morning, Ian is gone.


Numbed by abandonment, Frances sets out for the small town in Canada where she grew up-and where she began to make many poor choices. The novel flashes back to Frances as a curious, imaginative, and well-loved little girl who begins to lose herself once forced from her family's idyllic farm and into school. As she withdraws, only two people offer comfort: Dooley Sullivan, a prankster, and Silas Chance, an Indian who works at the lumberyard, and the Moon family's new tenant. Silas dies violently, the victim of a hit-and-run. And at the site there is evidence the driver stopped but did not help. In such a small town with the usual racial prejudices, the case is never solved. But years later, on the evening of her marriage, Frances remembers who the driver was.

Release date: August 16, 2016

Publisher: Marian Wood Books/Putnam

Print pages: 384

Sample

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Dianne Warren

 

1. My Cold,  Cold  Heart

 

 

 

We  were  firmly  lodged in a traffic jam in a small Irish town. Gridlock. No way for our rental car to move forward or back. Several tour buses—which we encountered  wher- ever we went, even though it was May and not yet high season—made matters worse. It was hard to imagine how the roads could handle any more of them. A policeman was manoeuvring on foot through the mess, trying to direct cars to an opening here and there,  but  it was impossible. Any opening inevitably led to another jam. A bicycle would have been hard-pressed to get through. People began to step out of their vehicles and walk away—surrendering, it seemed, to a hopeless situation.

I could see that we were stopped in front of a churchyard, and that many of the people leaving their cars were heading for the church. It began to make some sort of sense. A hearse was parked in front of the church, the coffin still inside. At- tendants in dark suits were staring at the traffic snarl-up.

“It’s a funeral,” I said. “That’s what has caused this.”

Ian rolled down his driver’s-side window and motioned to the policeman, who was now standing close to our car, no longer attempting to untangle the mess. He was staring, like us, at the churchyard.

“What’s going on?” Ian asked him. “It’s the funeral,” the policeman said.

“What I mean is, how long do you think we’ll have to sit here?”

 

 

“A young girl and her tiny baby,” the policeman said, ig- noring his question. “Just nineteen years, and the baby a few months. They’re in the coffin together. Terrible tragedy. The whole county’s come.”

“That’s so sad,” I said, still looking at the hearse, imagin- ing the mother and baby.

“It is, yes.” The policeman looked at his watch. “If you walk a quarter mile back the way you came, you’ll find a pub or two or three. Have a Guinness and wait it out.”

Then he left us and headed toward the church, and was soon lost among the others arriving from all directions.

“A girl and her baby,” I said. “I wonder what happened, but at the same time, I don’t want to know.”

“Can you believe it?” Ian said. “The only policeman in sight just gave up and went to the funeral.”

“Yes, and I like him for it. Never mind if we’re late. It can’t be helped.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene unfolding in the churchyard.  Just  nineteen, I thought,  and a baby too. The pallbearers were lifting the coffin from the hearse. There were so many flowers on top they spilled onto the ground and left a trail as the coffin was carried toward the church steps. I thought,  I lost a baby when I was nineteen. I was surprised by how easily the  memory had slipped into my consciousness.  It was something I had not thought about for years.

“I lost a baby when I was nineteen,” I said. “And by ‘lost,’ I don’t mean misplaced. The baby died.”

I watched as the men carried the coffin up the steps and into the church,  carefully, so as not to disturb its precious cargo, and the mourners began to follow and I realized what I had done—spoken the words aloud.

“It was a long time ago. Until now, I’ve never told a soul who wasn’t there. Even my mother and I barely spoke of it.”

“Let me understand,” Ian said. “You had a child? A baby?” “Yes, and it died,” I said. “Before that, I was married. But

 

 

not to the father of the baby. That’s a different story. I was married before the baby’s father, to someone else.”

He said nothing in response to this, stunned into silence, as would be anyone who’d lived with a person for over twenty years and had not been told such a thing.

An old man with a carved walking stick passed by, laying his free hand briefly on the hood of our car. He reminded me of a man we’d met in a pub in Dublin, who had told us he’d once been an actor. He’d used the term “player,” and had said that he’d been on stage many times at the famous Abbey The- atre, a claim Ian hadn’t believed. The man with the walking stick turned into the churchyard and fell into line with the people there while we sat without speaking, marooned in the car, the jumbled disorder of vehicles all around us, until a dog began to bark in a yard nearby. When another answered, and then another, and the barking grew into a frenzy, Ian opened his door and said, “I can’t stand this. We might as well find a pub. I don’t see what else we can do.”

We started back toward the town centre about the time three buses emptied out, the tour directors having come to the same conclusion we had—that there was no point in waiting. Over a hundred people were now walking along with us, many of them elderly. Good sports, I thought, with their arthritic knees and hearing aids. We were soon ahead of most of them, which turned out to be an advantage, since there were only three or four tiny pubs in the town.

We chose one and found ourselves a table in a corner. It was an old pub with mud walls and wooden beams and a fireplace burning peat. There were several signed photos of famous pop stars above the bar, and one of them was Sinéad O’Connor. The photo was hanging crookedly, as though no one had paid attention  to it for years. The fact that it was hanging there at all was prophetic, I thought, since Sinéad’s famous tirade against the pope had been on television the night Ian and I first met.

I pointed at the photograph and said, “Remember when

 

 

Sinéad ripped up the photo of the pope? It’s a wonder they’ve kept her picture here. She’s always offending Catholics. She was in the news again recently.”

Ian didn’t reply.

Which could have meant a number of things.

Several noisy Englishmen were sitting at a table near us, they too having been stranded by the funeral. Two of them looked to be about my age, nearer sixty than fifty, and the others were younger. They all wore hiking boots, and I imag- ined that they were on a hill-walking expedition of some sort. A hill walk had been on my holiday wish list, but we’d soon figured out how easy it would be to get lost, especially here in the west, where the cliffs dropped to the sea and you never knew when the fog would descend. A few days earlier, we had tried to walk to a hillside that looked to be within easy reach, but in no time we’d found ourselves ankle-deep in a peat bog and had given up.

A waiter came to the table and asked us what we’d like. I ordered a Guinness, said to cure everything from gout to migraine headaches—at least by people my age. Ian ordered something else. I wasn’t paying attention.

“So tell me,” he said once the drinks had been placed on the table in front of us. The label on his read Oyster, which I thought was an odd name for a beer. “Were you still married when you met me?”

Well. There it was, the question, and it was my own fault that it was now being put to me.

I could have said no. It would have been easier, and maybe we would have been better off if I had. But it would not have been the truth, and although there was a part of my life I had never told Ian about, I was not in the habit of lying to him.

“I’m still married now,” I said. “Unless my husband has died, in which case I guess I’d be a widow. That’s highly prob- able. He was twenty-three years older than me.”

And then there I was, with my head between my knees

 

 

because the room had begun to spin. It was the word “hus- band” that did it—the fact I had spoken the word out loud. It was perhaps the first time I had ever referred to Joe Fletcher as my husband.  When  the room stilled, I lifted myself to upright, and I saw that Ian was looking at me with little sym- pathy for my vertiginous state.

He said, “You’re still married to the first one, or to the baby’s father?”

I picked up my glass of Guinness, drank from it, swal- lowed, and set it down on the table again.

Then I said, to finish what I’d started, “The baby’s father was just a boy and we were never married. The husband was a man old enough to be my father. The baby was born too early and died, which I’ve already told you. There, now you know everything. These are things I swore I would never tell anyone. I became a different person afterward. But I’ve told you now, haven’t I? And I hope I’m not that  other person again. I don’t want to be.”

The waiter returned  then and asked if we wanted any- thing to eat. I ordered a plate of chips, even though I wasn’t hungry. When he brought them to me a few minutes later, I pointed once again at the off-kilter photograph above the bar and said to him, “I think Sinéad went into a tailspin after that business with the pope.”

“Ah, Sinéad,” the waiter said. “Tempest in a teapot. Vin- egar? Red sauce?”

I shook my head. “Neither. Just salt.”

We sat in the pub for another hour, not talking, picking at the chips, and waiting for enough time to pass that we could return to the car. I was beginning to feel ill, wonder- ing what tempest I myself had unleashed, and whether it would fit into a teapot. I’d spoken of things that I could not explain because  I had no explanation. They’d happened. I regretted that  they had. I knew no more than that.  My life had started over afterward, and then it had started over again when I met Ian. I began to fear that Joe Fletcher and

 

 

all that followed might once again be the cause of sorrow.

When we finally got back to the car, we found that the traffic had cleared out. The churchyard was deserted and there were no signs of the funeral save for the flowers that had fallen when the coffin was removed from the hearse. It was now possible to manoeuvre around the few remain- ing cars and tour buses, and we left, several hours behind schedule, concerned about the promise we’d made to a bed- and-breakfast owner named Mr. Burke, who’d asked us if we could manage an early arrival because his day was going to be complicated.

“Maybe we should have phoned from the pub,” I said. “He’s got no reason to give our room away,” Ian said. “It’s

paid for.”

“Still, just to be courteous.”

“We have a long drive ahead of us. Plenty of time for you to tell me quite a lot more than what you’ve told me so far.”

The highway, when we found it, was narrow and winding. Ian drove as though he was trying to make up time. I asked him to slow down, and when he did, I said, “You’re the one who gets annoyed when people expound on things they don’t know much about. Politics. The stock market. Genetically modified food. This is a bit the same. I can’t explain what happened a lifetime ago. I was barely out of high school.”

“What I’d really like to know,” he said, “is why you told me at all after twenty years.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I did.”

When we arrived at Mr. Burke’s West Country Inn, our host seemed to have forgotten all about his request that we come early. We still had a room for the night. All was well, at least in that regard.

 

 

 

By chance, the English climbers we’d seen in the pub— seven of them—were also staying that night at Mr. Burke’s. When the climbers acknowledged us in the parking lot, after

 

 

Ian and I had returned  from a painfully quiet dinner in a village up the road, it seemed right to speak, and we shared stories about the traffic bottleneck. Before we all retired to our rooms, the climbers asked us if we’d like to accompany them on a hill walk the next day—a relatively easy walk, safe for beginners. I said yes and Ian said no at the same time. The man who appeared to be the group leader said, “Just meet us in the breakfast room at six o’clock if you decide to come. Bring a daypack. We’ll bring lunch. Wear layers and walking shoes. That’s it. Nothing complicated.”

Once we were alone in our room, Ian said, “I’m not going. You do what you like.”

I set the alarm and opened a bottle of wine and poured myself a glass, which I drank sitting by the window and lis- tening to the ocean below while Ian had a shower. Then we went to bed.

We were lying in the darkness when he said to me, “Stop it. Whatever you’re doing, stop it.”

It took me a minute to realize he was referring to my fin- gers, which were tapping madly on the cotton duvet, an old habit. I rolled onto my side and shoved both hands under my pillow, the way I used to when I was a child.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I was a child, wearing a dental retainer. I was with my mother in the grocery store in my old hometown, and when her back was turned, I removed the retainer and hid it under a head of lettuce in the produce section, thinking that if it were lost, I would never have to wear it again. But the store clerk, who had been watching me, retrieved it and held it out to me as though she were holding a dead cat, and I woke up with a start.

It was not a dream. It was a memory, because  it had really happened,  and this was unsettling—to  be dreaming about memories. I remembered my embarrassment that the clerk had seen me put the retainer under the lettuce,  and my mother saying, “It serves you right, Frances. That was disgusting.”

 

 

When I went back to sleep I dreamed that Mr. Burke’s inn was falling over the cliff into the sea below, and on the way down I was shouting over the sound of the waves, “Are we good now? Ian? We’re good?”

The alarm buzzed.

I quickly turned  it off and slipped out of bed and got myself ready for the hill walk. Before I left the room, I sat down on the edge of the bed beside Ian and wondered if I should wake him and ask if he’d changed his mind. I didn’t suppose he had, but I bent and kissed his bare arm anyway. He twitched as though he were flicking away a bug, and he opened his eyes. I could see their colour, green, in the morn- ing light.

“I’m going now,” I said. “On the hill walk. I don’t think they said what time we’d be back. Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

When he didn’t answer I assumed he meant no and I

stood to leave, but he reached out and grabbed my hand. “I’m going back to Dublin today,” he said.

“Dublin? Why?” I didn’t understand.  I thought he was telling me that he was going for the day. We were scheduled to fly home from Dublin in four days’ time. Driving there for the day made no sense.

“I’m going to see if I can get an early ticket home. You can come if you want. If not, I’ll take the car and you can catch the train.”

I pulled my hand away.

“You’re going home?” I said. “That’s crazy.” “Are you coming with me or not?” he asked.

I tried to think. He wasn’t serious; he was just lashing out with a childish threat, although that was not like him.

“No,” I said. “Of course I’m not.”

He rolled away from me and dragged a pillow over his head.

I took a last look at him lying there, completely covered by the duvet and the pillow, and then  I left and went hill

 

 

walking, quite certain he would still be at the inn when I

returned.

 

 

 

A hired driver with a van took us to the trailhead, and the climber in charge—Philip, a man about my own age—re- corded the route of our walk in a notebook and then tore the page out and handed it to the driver. “In case we don’t show up when you come to collect us,” he said, and I wondered how often that happened. I noted the ropes and carabiners that were being secured to belts and backpacks—equipment I hadn’t thought  would be needed  for hill walking. When Philip saw me looking, he said that the equipment was pre- cautionary, and that he was an experienced climbing instruc- tor and had taken countless beginners on treks a lot more challenging than this one. We were standing beside the van in a gravel lot and I looked down at his feet. His boots were solid, and at the same time they were worn. He had no doubt owned them for years.

“Your boots look like veterans,” I said. “That’s reassuring.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll have a good day. “

I did. The hill walk was exhilarating, and one of those things that just happens unexpectedly and was, therefore, a gift. Although most of the men were younger than  me—a few of them young enough to be my sons—I didn’t give the age difference more than a thought. Nor did I think about the fact that I was the only woman in the group. There were times when we climbed single file and there wasn’t much talking, all of us keeping our eyes on the footing. At other times, when we crossed a more level, open area, there was friendly chatter, and I discovered that what the Englishmen had in common, besides a love of hill walking, was Christi- anity. Normally, faith was a concept  not remotely interest- ing to me—I required proof to believe in something—but these men charmed me with their easy ways, and I wondered whether I’d be joining a cult by the end of the day.

 

 

We stopped for a quick lunch—quick, Philip told me, so we would retain our body heat, even though it was a warm day and I didn’t feel as though I was losing any. As we ate our bologna sandwiches and orange slices, I noticed that two of the men appeared to be together, a couple, and then I began to wonder whether, in addition to being Christians, all the men were gay, and I believed they might be. I had never been with a group of exclusively gay men before. I found myself wondering what religion they belonged to that was so accept- ing of their sexuality, and why they had accepted me so will- ingly into their fold, if only for a day.

Not long after lunch, we reached the height of the hill walk—a peak with a spectacular view of the sea far below— and prepared for the trip back. I had assumed we would return  the  way we’d come, but  no, we were to begin the descent  by traversing the backside of the sea cliff, a steep face of loose black shale. I felt close to panic when I looked down and saw what was expected of me, disbelieving that we could possibly descend  this way. But when Philip told me it was my turn to go, I went, running back and forth, fol- lowing the directions he shouted at me, not stopping once I was moving because to stop would be to slip and send myself and a cascade of loose rocks straight down to the bottom. I did what I was told, my heart pounding, two of the younger men already at the bottom and cheering me on, and I saw myself the way they saw me—a middle-aged woman doing something she’d never imagined herself doing—and I didn’t care, and my worry was forgotten. For a moment, I was fear- less, the way my mother and I had once been, or thought we were, until we found out—first one and then  the other— that we were not.

The rest of the day was spent walking, often single file, on a narrow, winding trail. Fog settled and there wasn’t much to see other than the few sheep that appeared out of the mist from time to time with splashes of red or blue on their coats to iden- tify their owners. Somewhere along the trail I joined up with

 

 

Philip and we chatted, exchanging pleasantries about where we lived and what we did. He said he was a secondary school teacher, which didn’t surprise me. I told him I was a microbi- ologist in the water department of a mid-sized city in western Canada. He thought that was impressive, but I assured him it really wasn’t, since my job was now mostly administrative and I barely understood modern water treatment systems. I said I’d come to realize I was slouching my way to retirement. I told him also that my parents had emigrated from England, and he asked me if I’d ever been there, and I said no, there were no family ties. I wasn’t even sure where in England they’d come from. The north, I thought, although they’d worked in London during the war. Philip thought it was unusual that I expressed no interest in knowing more. I agreed. “But they’re both gone now,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

My hamstrings  turned  to jelly from hours  of walking downhill, and I was never so glad as when I saw the van wait- ing for us at the pickup point. The men congratulated me on my stamina—they actually applauded as I climbed into the van—and they confessed that there had been an easier way down, which they would have taken had they not believed I could handle the shale slope. I was flattered and, now that I was safely in the van, elated. I was ceremoniously given the slip of paper with our route on it as a souvenir, and I folded it and put it in my pocket. I almost fell asleep on the winding drive to Mr. Burke’s inn. I didn’t wonder whether Ian would be there when we got back. In fact, I’d completely forgotten about Dublin and an early flight home.

When we arrived, the driver dropped us in the parking lot and two of the younger men transferred their gear from the van to the trunks of their cars. I found myself walking with Philip across the lot to the inn, and it wasn’t until then that I noticed our rental car—mine and Ian’s—was not where it should have been. I stopped walking. Philip stopped beside me. I stood staring, as though a crack had opened in the park- ing lot and swallowed our car.

 

 

“What is it?” Philip asked. “I’ve made a mistake,” I said. “Sorry?”

I felt myself somewhere between tears and anger, but I

managed to hold both at bay.

“I think Ian is gone,” I said. “It’s my fault. I haven’t been honest with him. I’m not a good partner. In fact, I’m not even a very good person.”

Philip looked at me as though he was thinking, and then he said, “I don’t know you well enough. I’m sorry.”

Of course he was right. What had I expected him to say? Did I think he would be comforting because he was a Chris- tian, or a man who liked a good confidence because he was gay? We walked on then,  as though I had not spoken, and I tried to cover my embarrassment  by babbling about how tired I was, and who would have thought walking downhill would be as tiring as walking up? We parted in the foyer of the inn and I returned to our room, where I found that Ian had indeed left.

I could have thought, Why would he do that? But instead I sat by the open window wrapped in a blanket, shivering, thinking about how I deserved to be left behind. I was the same person I’d always been, the silly girl who ignored every bit of advice and every warning she’d been given by people who cared about her. I’d revealed my true history to Ian when it was too late for him to make his own choice about things as important as marriage and children. He’d been duped by a charlatan in a black dress on the night we’d met, when he was still a handsome twenty-six-year-old, recently jilted and far too good for my cold heart—or at least that’s the way I saw it at that moment.

I went to bed without eating, my body tired and aching. I didn’t know whether it was self-pity that kept me awake or euphoria from the hill-walking adventure. The two vied for my attention, and I managed to snatch only a few minutes of sleep here and there.

 

 

My encounter with  the Englishmen was not quite over. At breakfast the next morning they greeted me as though I were an old friend and told me they were all going to church, an Irish Sunday mass. I hadn’t been to church  since the last wedding I’d attended,  but  I agreed to go—not because  I wanted to go to mass, but because I wanted to be with them. I noticed Philip looking at the spot in the parking lot where our car should have been, but  he didn’t mention  Ian. We walked to the church in a group and sat in a long pew and the locals stared at us, especially the children. Some of the climbers knelt and genuflected  during the mass, and they all prayed and sang joyously. One of the younger men had a beautiful voice, and I wondered if he might even be a profes- sional singer.

We exchanged fellowship greetings at the end of the ser- vice with the large family in the pew in front of us. Afterward, we went back to the bed and breakfast and collected our bags, but still we didn’t go our separate ways, because when I told them I would be taking the train to Dublin to arrange an early flight home, they said they were going there  too. They’d travelled in two rental cars, and they made room for me in one. They even drove me to the airport. No one asked about Ian or why I was travelling alone now, so I assumed Philip had told them  what I’d said to him. My eyes filled with tears as we said our goodbyes. They hugged me one by one, and I didn’t hold back but fell into them, each one, like a person desperate for comfort. Philip told me I was special and I didn’t know what to say, but I felt, briefly, as though it might be true.

Afterward, when they were gone and I was inside the Dublin airport, I remembered  that  the  business of believ- ing anyone could be special was what had made me, like my mother before me, suspicious of Christians,  or at least the ones who insisted on telling you they were Christians. As though anything at all—goodness, intelligence, least of all faith—made you special. I was glad to have that straight

 

 

again, even though I appreciated the kindness of the men and believed it had been genuine.

Because the flight to Toronto was full, I had to wait to find out if there would be a seat for me, but eventually I heard my name on the intercom—Frances Moon, please report to the Air Canada counter—and I was told that, yes, I could change my ticket, and I was given a boarding pass. I wondered if Ian would be on the same flight, but I didn’t see him anywhere and assumed he had flown home the previous day.

As I got in the boarding lineup, I noticed an enormously obese man in front of me. I followed him onto the plane, and he made his way through business class and past the plus- size seats, which were all taken, to an ordinary aisle seat in row 23, where he sat after lifting the armrest between it and the next seat.

Row 23. I glanced at my own boarding pass, and sure enough, I also was seated in row 23, right next to the man. I slipped out of the line of passengers, ducking my head be- neath the overhead bins, and tried to decide what to do. I could see that there was only half a seat remaining next to him. I wasn’t a big person, but I would be in for an uncom- fortable flight home if that was the only seat available to me. Could I ask a flight attendant to find me another one? Could I do so without making a scene or humiliating the man? It seemed like some kind of ethical dilemma.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Ms. Moon?” a voice said. I turned around to a flight at- tendant, who asked to see my boarding pass. Then she quiet- ly told me they were upgrading me to business class because there were no other free seats in economy. She was speaking almost in a whisper. No mention was made of the reason for the move from my assigned seat. I followed her back through the line of people and their carry-on lu