Once, before Ry was born, Tal had taken her to Mexico. She’d sat on the hood of a cherry-bright rental car as heat lightning pulsed in great white spasms over the Pacific. Tal kneeled on the hot parking-lot asphalt, prostrating himself before her, kissing her feet and ankles. Later they sat in their hotel’s beachside bar, sipping sweet rum drinks from crockery cups. No one expressed concern as the hillsides bracketing Manzanillo Bay burned. They asked their waitress and she shrugged without looking at the fires and said only, the farmers.
The difference between that life and this one made her feel hollow inside.
Sarah Lee caught the bus and took it four stops to a soccer field, which was still soggy with the melting of yesterday’s snow. She walked across the field and through the playground to the school’s back door, joining a couple of dozen other parents and caregivers when the bell sounded.
The door was opened by a teacher, who looked for each child to recognize an adult before releasing them into the world. The children’s exposure to an adultless world lasted for only a heartbeat, and then they were back in the care of a grown-up. It reminded Sarah Lee of a trapeze act.
***
Before dinner, she sat on the sofa with a can of hard iced tea while, at her feet, Ry plugged Lego bricks into one another, building a house for his noisy little battery-operated hamster. He was blond as beach grass, with large, wide-set hazel eyes, and he looked so much like Tal—in the shape of his face, and his mouth especially—that it sometimes hurt her to look at him. When a smile broke across his face, it gave her a feeling like a mouthful of sweet wine, sharp and warm in her cheeks.
She went out to the porch to have a cigarette. Reg was still out there, his legs crossed on one of the wire chairs, using the lid of a jar of jam as an ashtray. Beneath the lid was a pack she figured to be hers.
“That my spare pack?”
“Yep. I’ll get you back. Next trip to the store.”
“Me or you?”
“I’ll take a walk in the morning.”
“Thought you couldn’t walk that far. Isn’t that the whole issue?”
“Can’t stop altogether. Everything’ll lock up.”
She took the chair next to him and held her hand out. “Give ’em here,” she said, and he passed her the pack. She took one out, ran it under her nose to sniff the paper and the tobacco, then popped it in between her lips. Reg retrieved a Bic from the front pocket of his shirt and flicked, holding the flame out toward her.
The clouds piled up on the horizon as the afternoon pinched toward evening, arranging themselves into shapes like a map of lost continents cast in bronze. The air around them held a sweet April dampness, looked and felt green. Sarah Lee found herself drawn into a moment of dreaminess looking at the clouds.
“Beautiful,” Reg said, having followed her eyes to the sky. He said it again, slowly, as though he had come across some archaic meaning of the word.
His voice brought her back to the porch, and to the man sitting next to her. The man who’d been her father until he decided, when she was almost exactly Ry’s age, that he no longer wanted to be. She went looking for memories of him from back then, but she didn’t find much. Just things she associated with him, tenuously, perhaps erroneously: instant coffee, Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes, galoshes, an uncle who’d fiddled in Don Messer’s Islanders, fields of corn, mumbled sermons. Alcoholism like an heirloom, passed down and down again. All just an approximation, something short of understanding. There was nothing she could hold on to.
For dinner she made pancakes in a skillet that still smelled of ground beef. “It’s the only thing I can be sure he’ll eat,” she said to Reg, who sat hunched over in a chair in the middle of the kitchen, watching.
Over dinner, it grew into a gloomy evening, a mean fog blowing in off Lake Ontario. Despite that, Reg went back out to the porch to smoke, while she put Ry to bed.
“You need a bath,” she said, tucking a fleece blanket over his thin chest and shoulders. His fingernails were dirty, his hair matted.
“No.”
“In the morning. Remind me to remind you.”
“Never never.”
“Right.” She kissed his forehead. “Right right.”
On a shelf over his bed was half a wasps’ nest, three rocks, three more pine cones, and an animal he’d made out of a toilet paper roll and yogourt cups.
She turned off the light.
“You worry too much over that boy,” said Reg when she went back out to the porch.
“What the hell would you know about it?”
“I know, I know,” he said, “you’ll always have that comeback.”
“It’s not a comeback, Reg. It’s just a fact. It’s how things actually are.”
“It’s always something,” he said. “I’m not perfect. Nobody is.”
Sarah Lee said goodnight then and went to bed, where she seethed and watched TV until it was far too late to get a good night’s sleep.
***
She forgot to put Ry in the bath the next morning, but managed to deliver him to the lineup outside the primary doors just as the bell rang. Then she took the bus to the central depot where Regina picked her up for their Tuesday houses. There were three of them in the Bridle Path, awful new houses with concrete statuary and pea gravel in soft pastel shades between the ornamental shrubs, extra cars in the long drives.
Regina was her sole confidante, a woman somewhere between thirty and death. Sometimes Sarah Lee thought Regina might be younger than she looked, which was not to say that she appeared haggard or worn, but rather that there was a kind of sturdy timelessness about her which made it seem improbable she had ever participated in the inconstant passions of youth. There was also her wisdom, dispensed like Tic Tacs from a bottomless clear plastic box always found at the bottom of her purse.
“He’s my ex-father,” she called from the bathroom, where she was wiping down a mirror. Regina was two rooms away, dusting, but there was nobody home, so they could be as loud as they wanted.
“Defrocked?”
“What? No, not a priest. He’s my dad, but he walked out when I was six. He stopped being my dad when he did that. Ex-father.”
“Oh, hon, I’m sorry,” Regina said. “Okay, I’m turning this on.”
Sarah Lee heard the vacuum switch on, Regina’s voice swallowed up inside a vortex of whirring and sharp clicks as the suction plucked God knows what from the carpet’s deep, rich fibres. They told clients they could clean a house so not even the police would know who’d been there, and sometimes Sarah Lee wondered if that’s exactly what they were doing. The things she found.
Minutes later, when she’d finished the home-theatre room, Regina continued, “Bad house guests are the worst.”
“It’s so much worse than just that,” said Sarah Lee, but then felt too tired and deflated to tell Regina just how bad it all really was.
***
When they got home, Ry racing so far ahead that he had to wait for her at the front door, they found that Reg was out. Sarah Lee felt happier than she’d expected to. The day had turned bright and warm. The apple tree which hung over the ratty and crooked fence from the neighbours’ yard was thinking about coming into blossom. Ry had made it through the school day without peeing his pants.
She took a tall can of hard iced tea from the fridge, then she and her boy went out into the small yard, where she sat on the back step and watched him crawl around on his knees and hands, looking for treasures in the new grass. Nearby, somebody was playing a violin, music more beautiful than she could stand. She shut her eyes against it, wished they’d stop. What would anybody do with more happiness? She’d had more, once, and it left her limping and speechless. It slammed the door on her bare knuckles. Tal would’ve crawled over broken glass and rusted nails to put his nose against the softest part of her neck—and then, all of a sudden, he wouldn’t.
Where’s the comfort in something so fickle?
Ry found an earring in the grass. She got ano
ther iced tea. There was orange juice on the wall near the fridge, in sticky little dots, and the inside of the microwave was covered in a dull, oily sheen.
Where did all the hours of the day go?
Reg came home with fresh cigarettes and a nasty attitude.
“I got this pack, but I can’t keep doing that. I have to think about the costs I’ll incur once they slice open my leg.”
“You and me both.”
“You got more of those iced teas?”
“See, like that,” she said.
“I think we should take a little trip. When’s your next day off?”
“Sunday. Where?”
“See your mother.”
Sarah Lee’s mother, Betty Counsell, had been buried seven years. Betty was small and talkative, not exactly pretty but alluringly alive. There was a thickness in her consonants that always made Sarah Lee think of heavy, moist clay soil, of terrestrial concerns. Her mother was an earthy woman, an impression confirmed by every maternal relation Sarah Lee had ever met. They were earthy people.
Betty now rested in a small, cornfield-enclosed hillside cemetery in East Garafraxa, Ontario, the fecund nexus of Counsell family history. It was where Reggie Gallard, a lowly field hand, had fathered Sarah Lee before taking both her and young Betty to the rim of Toronto in order to dispatch taxis and sling burgers and cut grass and collide with police cruisers in a rusty Chevy Nova.
East Garafraxa had long assumed a note of whimsy in Sarah Lee’s mind, tinged with as much inaccessible magic as its Seussian name suggested. The place was real, yes, but so removed from her. In East Garafraxa, there were crows the size of dogs, and waterways that froze solid so it was possible to excavate elaborate tunnel systems through them, and to live in those tunnels from Christmas until March, and children were conceived in the open tilled fields on orange summer evenings. In East Garafraxa, there radiated the disorienting sense that history had been made there, was still capable of being made there.
Something had ended just short of her, and now Sarah Lee and Ry were left doing whatever they would do in a vacuum, until they stopped doing it. And then they would just be gone.
The slim volume of her history was written within the rectilinear bounds of Ajax. She was an average child, happy until Reg’s ghost routine, sullen afterwards. Whip-smart, or so said Betty. In high school, where her best friend was a girl named Alberta Milk, Sarah Lee was vampy and bold and did not for a moment suspect she was the freest she would ever be. Tal came then, as well as the tailspin which felt like an ascent—or velocity, in any case. Substance abuse, bad jobs, selfish sex. She was unable to see her youth’s fast-approaching end, a future of precarious employment and damaging relationships, with a child but no mate, saying to anyone who’d listen, How did I get here?
Instead of creating new memories, she was merely existing. Her days were like tape unspooling from the mouth of a machine. The most solid thing she had was Ry’s dependence on her. She had to keep him going. Try to expose him to happiness.
There was no place for Reg in all this.
“So let’s go,” he said again.
“I don’t think so, Reg,” she said.
“How come?”
“First thing is, in whose car? We don’t have a car.”
“I can see that.”
“Second thing is, fuck you. You didn’t care about Mom dying when she did it. Why would you care now?”
“Well, I just thought—”
“Nope, just realized I don’t care. Whatever answer you’re about to give, swallow it. I shouldn’t have asked the question.”
“Aw, you don’t know what you want. Neither’d your mother.”
“Do us both a favour and open up that pack of cigs and put one of them in your mouth,” said Sarah Lee.
“I guess I will,” said Reg, but he looked like he wanted to put a fist through some drywall.
Before anybody could say anything else, Sarah Lee stood and went in the back door, past Reg’s daybed chamber and into the kitchen to see if she could find anything other than Kraft Dinner and boiled wieners to call dinner.
***
A few months earlier, Sarah Lee had opened her eyes and realized that Ry wasn’t the round bundle she’d always known him to be. He was a rake. She was at a point where she was glad when he ate anything, and had taken to shovelling empty calories in any form into him in the hopes that he’d start to fill out. The nutritional value she didn’t worry about; she had a blind sort of faith that his body would take care of all that. So the fact that he’d had seconds of the Kraft Dinner—with extra ketchup—felt like a bit of a victory. Possibly even enough of one to salvage the day.
She finished the dishes—Reg never offered—while the boy sat on the couch watching one more episode of Paw Patrol. Then she went out to the front porch, where Reg sat in silence. She could tell by his shoulders that their earlier conversation was over and done. They’d both forgotten it, or wordlessly agreed to pretend they had. That was fine by her.
“He needs a bike,” Reg said. “How’s a boy gonna explore his world without a bike?”
“Got one, but the tires are flat,” she said, sitting down in the chair next to him and signalling for a cigarette.
He gave her the pack from his pocket. “We’ll fix it,” he said.
“Don’t think they can be fixed,” she said. “Needs new ones. You like to pay for that?”
“No.”
“No, me neither.”
“Should have maintained it. Kept it up. That’s what you need to do,” he said. “You’ve got to maintain the things in your life. It’s the things we don’t maintain that always come back to bite us in the ass.”
Sarah Lee was about to say something in reply, something about how his statement was kind of rich, given their current situation, but then she saw that the bronzed continents of clouds were back high out over the lake, and the birds were in a state of uproar over something she couldn’t glean.
She bent her head forward and pressed her chin to her chest, hoping to feel things lengthen and pop, to slacken the lacework of muscle strung between the shoulder blades, the spine as tent pole, holding even while bent against the weight. But she felt nothing, just a dry red heat in those muscles, the same old ache.
She decided she’d just let him have this one.
Graceland
CONNIE’D BEEN SICK about three years. When it became clear that she couldn’t do it on her own, I moved back in. Her sister Georgia came back to Kemptville, too, and she brought her boyfriend Seb with her.
We’d been on again, off again for about ten years. Mostly on, but with some off periods, most of which were my doing. I told her early on, “I’m a sucker’s bet.” But then she got her diagnosis and everything kind of snapped into focus. After that, I put her to bed at night and I got her up in the morning and I stood outside the bathroom door when she showered, just in case. When I was working, Georgia would come by. It worked out because she served nights at the Breakaway and my shoots were all daytime gigs.
Every so often, if Connie was doing well, I’d wait until she was asleep, then slip out and drive the fifteen minutes into town to have a drink or two at the Breakaway. I could talk to Georgia there, which was nice. We could talk about Connie, even complain about her, and have everything be in bounds, because Georgia was the only other person in the world who really knew what my life was like. It was good to have her around, even for all the trouble it later brought.
Seb, on the other hand, I had my doubts about. He was lazy. He’d started three different courses of study, one at York and two at community colleges, and finished none. He’d been a carpet cleaner and a bouncer and a sandwich artist. After he and Georgia relocated from Toronto, the best he could find was overnights at a gas station. He made my spotty employment history look like the CV of a Fortune 500 CEO. He wore stupid jeans and he shaved his head twice a week and he listened to the worst music. “Club beats,” he called them.
“What about Hank
?” I once asked him.
“Hank who?”
That became our joke. Seb would have his music, which sounded like someone dropping a tennis ball down a laundry chute, playing on his phone, and I’d say, “Are you sure Hank done it this way?” And Seb would roll his eyes, and I’d laugh. If Connie was around, she’d howl, too. We did that bit all the time.
Once, Georgia suggested Seb help me with shoots.
“No,” I’d said. “No way.”
But she said, “Just try him out.” And then she gave me those eyes, just like the ones her older sister used to give me—the ones I couldn’t say no to.
***
Life walks on you when you’re down. Hold that ruler against most any period of my life, and you’ll see that was the size of things. But for a while there, things were fairly okay. I mean, Connie was sick and I was drinking, but I put a lot of trust in her doctors, who said a turnaround was possible. Money was coming in, and I was able to salt it away for whatever. Life was quiet in a way that seemed right, or anyway, appropriate to the circumstances.
Connie and I would sit in the house on Dennison Road and open a window. She’d light a joint, and I’d have something to drink. Before she got sick, we’d both have beers, but when things started to slide, it became a beer for me and a McDonald’s vanilla shake for her. I’d hit the drive-through on 43 and speed back with it so when I got home it would be just soft enough but not all the way melted. After things got worse, she’d just sit with her joint.
Lands and Forests Page 6
