Shadows On The River. Linda Hall
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the roads. And when we can get shoveled out.”
The two of us headed downstairs to make Saturday-morning waffles. Maddy went and stood in front of the picture window and gazed out at the snow. The morning sun peeked through the clouds. It was a white, wintry wasteland out there, a pale desert after a sandstorm. Sun on snow always brings a beauty, a whiteness to the inside of a house that isn’t there in other seasons. The snowplows hadn’t been by yet, so there was no delineation between the frontyard and road. One hearty soul was already out there attempting to clear his driveway with his snowblower, but it had gotten windy suddenly and from here it looked like the snow he was blowing was landing right back where it started.
Later when the wind died down, Maddy and I would bundle ourselves up and try to clean up the place with our shovels. The task looked daunting. Maybe my kind duplex neighbor Gus would snowblow my driveway when he cleared his own. He often did.
I pulled out the waffle iron from under my cupboard beside the stove and plugged it in to warm it up. I got out the eggs and flour and frozen blueberries and while I did so, I aimed the remote at the television to see if there was any news of the storm. Or of Larry Fremont. Especially Larry Fremont.
The news was the storm, of course, which had left an estimated twenty thousand Haligonians out of power. I felt fortunate that all we’d had were a couple of flickers. There was nothing about Larry Fremont, or the death of his associate.
Maddy, now clad in her favorite slippers and pink fleece housecoat, helped me measure flour into the mixing bowl, getting it all over her hands. She was signing happily about snow and skates and how much fun we’d have later, and could we make a snowman? And a snow fort? And could we have a snowball fight? And could her friend Miranda come over to play?
“Hey,” I signed, “Don’t talk so wildly, you’re getting flour all over the place.”
She giggled and wiped her fingers on her housecoat before she signed again. “Can Miranda come over?”
I nodded and signed that we could do all of those things, except, for perhaps, Miranda. “It will be hard to get anywhere today,” I signed.
Miranda is her school friend and deaf like Maddy.
The news flipped to a new item. I listened with one ear while I finished up the waffle batter.
Maddy said, “Look.” She said these words rather than signed them and I was really proud of her for talking. I followed her gaze to a man on cross-country skis who was walking a dog. It looked windswept and barren, like some scene out of Nanook of the North.
“Can we go skating like him?” she asked me.
I did a sort of made-up finger spelling sign for skiing, because this wasn’t a word I thought she knew. The two of us, like every deaf family, have a lot of made-up signs, “family signs,” they’re called.
“Can we go skiing, then?”
I laughed and said we had no skis. I poured the batter onto the waffle iron, filling every crevice. She kept her eyes on the snow while the waffle sizzled.
When it was done, I opened it up and took out the waffle, cut it in two and placed it on our plates. I poured on thick maple syrup, the real stuff, and we sat down and began to dig in. As we did so it struck me, as it sometimes does, that we didn’t offer any kind of table grace. The only time we ever do is when my parents come for a visit. I grew up in the church with grace at every meal and summer church camp and memorizing Bible verses and Sunday School. There are times when I wonder if Maddy might be missing out.
She was pouring on way too much syrup and I signed that that was enough. She turned away from me, pretending not to see. That’s what she does when she doesn’t want to talk to me, she’ll either turn her face away or close her eyes, scrunching them up and facing me defiantly. Although I love her to death, my little daughter can be stubborn at times.
I heard the name Fremont from the television and turned quickly away from Maddy and aimed the remote to turn up the volume. But it was the identical broadcast that I’d heard before. No new information. What was I expecting? And why did I care so much anyway?
After breakfast Maddy and I spent a lazy morning cleaning the house and doing laundry and making a batch of ginger molasses cookies. Later on she “chatted” with Miranda via her computer and then watched TV. Other mothers mind when their children spend too much time on the computer, but not me. It enhances Maddy’s reading. I tried to keep my eyes open while I sat at the table and worked a bit more on the boat design, but I was tired, very tired. What I wouldn’t give for a nap.
The snowplow eventually came by, leaving a tanker-load full of snow at the end of my driveway. By early afternoon, I began to hear the sound of snowblowers in the neighborhood. If you closed your eyes you could almost pretend it was summer and these were lawn mowers.
Midafternoon my neighbor began snowblowing my driveway. I waved to him from the picture window. Bless him. My neighbor Gus and his wife, Dolores, often make sure my driveway is plowed. I rarely even have to mow my own lawn in the summer. I know they feel sorry for me, a single mother with a deaf daughter.
I looked again. There were two men out there working on my driveway. Gus was behind the snowblower and someone else wielded a shovel at the end of it. I peered more closely. Mark? Could that possibly be Mark? I squinted. Yes! Farther down the street was his car. I put a hand to my face. Why on earth was he here shoveling my driveway? And how had he driven these roads in the first place?
I grabbed my coat and pulled on my boots and signed to Maddy to “Wait here. Watch from the window. I’ll be right back.”
I stomped through thigh-high snow to where Gus had cleaned a foot-wide swath to the end of my driveway. Mark looked up, saw me, grinned and put down the shovel and leaned on it rakishly. Mark has these studious, smart, good looks that can stop women in their tracks. With his neatly cut short, light hair, and his little rectangular glasses, he looks upscale; rich even, like he belongs in New York, not Halifax. No matter what he wears, clothes look so good on him. Like today. Even though he had pulled a ratty-looking, gray woolen toque down over his ears and that old man’s green down jacket.
I called to him. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought you might need a plow out.”
“And you came all the way over here?” The moment I said it, I realized I had no clue where he lived. He could live on the next street for all I knew.
“Actually,” he said scooping another shovelful of snow. “I was up late. I got going on the interior design of the boat. I wanted to run some of these plans by you.”
“And so you come out on a day like today?” Without calling first? I wanted to add.
“Why not?” He grinned a crooked little grin and I felt myself melting under his gaze.
“How did you even know where I live?” I was still astounded that he was actually here.
“Your address is on a lot of stuff at the office. It was easy to look it up online.” He searched for my address? Stop it, I told myself, stop staring at him so intently.
I looked at the window and Maddy waved at me. I pointed. “My daughter. I have to go inside. But we’ll be back. She wants to come out into the snow.”
“She’s signaling to you rather vigorously.”
“She’s not signaling,” I said. “She’s signing. She’s deaf.”
“Oh.”
Inside, I helped my extremely eager and bright-eyed daughter into her snowsuit, wool hat and mittens. I did the same for myself, changing out of my grungy baking sweatshirt and into a nice sweater. Then I bundled up against the cold. The wind out there was still gusty.
Maddy rushed ahead of me out the door, arms spread wide. She immediately jumped into three feet of snow and giggled.
“That’s my daughter, Madison,” I told Mark. “As you can see, she hates