Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

  I began thinking that as long as I was working in the States, we might as well find somewhere nicer to be, or warmer anyway. Maybe California.

  ***

  While scouring an online job board, I came across the opening in Yuma. It wasn’t California, but the Arizona desert seemed close enough. It seemed to possess an edge, a frontier feeling. I needed that. In Watertown, there were no edges—just the slow, slumping shape of your life going flat in the middle. Not horribly, and perhaps not even all that sadly. But eventually I think you wake up in a place like Watertown and say to yourself, Why didn’t I go to Yuma? And all the answers you could come up with would feel pretty unsatisfactory.

  “What do you think of Yuma?” I asked Shona one wild night in November, as we lay all twisted together in that cold bed.

  “I think of Gary Cooper,” Shona said.

  “You’re thinking of High Noon,” I said. “Somebody else was in 3:10 to Yuma.”

  “Then they remade it with what’s his name.”

  “The Australian guy.”

  “Crowe,” she said. “Russell Crowe.”

  “Right. And Batman. Christian Bale.”

  “Why do you want to know about Yuma?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking of going there. Moving there.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, I mean it. There’s an opening at a station there, and I’m sick of this cold. And winter hasn’t even hit yet.”

  “What do I think,” she said, narrowing her eyes and pushing her lips out into a pout. “I think you can’t just keep jumping around, Russ, is what I think. Candace needs a home.”

  “Maybe, sure, yes,” I said. “But what I figure is I find her one now, before she starts school. Kids her age, they adapt. They’re very good at it.”

  Shona got up then and stretched her arms above her head. I could just make her out in the dark, wearing nothing but her black underwear. She walked across the room and opened the door, went into the bathroom. I closed my eyes and listened to my own breathing and the whine of the pipes as she ran water.

  When she came back, she sat on the side of the bed near me and she put her hand on my chest. “I can’t tell if you’re serious,” she said.

  “I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “And you’re asking me to come?”

  “Yes. I expect people do yoga in Yuma, too.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “So?”

  I know that Shona, at that point in her life, was feeling a lot like I was: without vista, without a chance to see things. Hemmed in by a lot of small stuff. I didn’t think then that it was cowardly to drop your life and take up a new one, in a new place, so long as you weren’t hurting anyone. I couldn’t see what might be holding me and Candace to Watertown, or Shona to Ottawa. Yes, everything was fine enough—but why couldn’t it be even better?

  I thought we owed it to ourselves to try.

  “Give me time, Russ. I need to think about this. To figure out what’s best for me.”

  “I understand,” I said, though I didn’t. Not then.

  We got up the next morning to find that the snow had begun. The sense I had then, that the winter would not end until April or May, sealed things for me, though I did not and would not say that to Shona.

  The snow was still flying when she left us on Sunday afternoon, and the roads looked awful. I bundled Candace up in her snowsuit and we went out in our small driveway to dig out Shona’s car. Shona had only a pair of high-heeled boots with her, and wore a small leather coat with one of her big, luxurious scarves elaborately wrapped around her neck and shoulders. She looked lovely, though cold, and I had to be aware of the chance that I wouldn’t see her again.

  “You don’t have snows on this car,” I said.

  “All-seasons. They’re good. I’m good.”

  “All-seasons aren’t for all seasons. It’s a bad name. I need you to get home safe, Shon,” I said. “I need you to go easy and take your time.”

  “Yes, baby,” she said, in a way that was sweet, but also, I knew, making a little fun of me, of the parental me, the worrier, the protector.

  “Can you let me know when you get there?” I said. “Call or text?”

  I put my hands on her face then, and I thought about those invisible signals, the ones that carry words, carry sounds, pass through our clothing and bodies, through walls and features of the landscape.

  “I will,” she said, and nodded, then kissed me. She stooped, kissed and hugged Candace, who’d been standing by my feet, and then she stood and kissed me again, harder, more desperately, like a person who is starving. After that, she climbed into her car, and was gone.

  ***

  The long and short of it is that I gave my notice and gathered our few things, and by the New Year we were in Yuma, my little girl and I.

  The drive gave us the chance to see the Grand Canyon. Candace didn’t quite seem to believe it was real—as though it were a thing I’d dreamed up and shown her, and after we turned our backs it would dissolve. I held her in my arms and we stood near the lip of it, the ground falling away from us, the sky set to swallow us. Everything wild.

  I told her, “For now you’ll have to take my word for it, but that’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever see.”

  “It’s pretty,” she said—fearing, I could tell, that my feelings would be hurt if she did not praise the sight. She is, at times, as sensitive as her mother was.

  Of the desert she said, over and over again, “Where’s the trees?”

  “In this part of the world, they’re cactuses. But you don’t say cactuses, you say cacti.”

  “Prickles!”

  When we got to Yuma, I took a little suite in a motel among the RV parks and minigolf courses on the edge of town. Candace had her side of the room and I had mine, a counter and a lattice divider running half the length of the room in between. I sat on the bed and watched college football while running my hands over the keyboard of a laptop, looking for a place for us to rent.

  Before we’d left, I’d been in touch with the manager of STAR 100.9, who’d been kind of non-committal about her desire to meet with me. “I’m coming to Yuma anyway,” I’d said on the phone, “so I’d appreciate a chance to sit down and tell you why I’m right for your station.”

  “Why don’t you get in touch when you arrive here?” she’d said.

  I got the uneasy sense that there was no longer an opening, or at least not an opening for me. But I bullied ahead anyway, thinking my enthusiasm might translate into good things for Candace and me.

  It only took a few days to find a house. It was a two-bedroom place with a kitchen the size of a closet and a scrubby little yard. Dogs roamed freely and howled all night and the Interstate zoomed past my bedroom window. I put down first and last rent, and started to furnish it with finds from the Goodwill. After a couple of nights on the floor I found a futon for Candace, and for me an old oak bed frame, thick and dramatic, into which I dropped a Craigslist mattress. Life rolled on.

  The station manager—her name was Wendy Farquhar—continued to deflect, and I figured I’d better find something temporary in case this radio business took too long in coming together. I presented myself at the jobs office downtown, gave them my old road-construction credentials, and found myself on a crew a few days later. Meanwhile, Candace was being watched by a mom in the neighbourhood, a woman named Felicia, who had two of her own and another in her care. Paying her, plus the rent, plus the new furniture and things, on top of the gas and food and motels for the trip down, had me scratching the bottom of the barrel and needing that first road-crew cheque pretty badly.

  The heat was like nothing else. I can’t describe it to you. I lost ten pounds my first week with the crew. We were on a stretch of I-8 to the east of the city, just over the hills, where agricultural land hugged the river on the one side, and the other was pure, parched Sonoran waste. I stood all day in that godless sun with a shovel in my hand, or a rake, bent over
steaming asphalt, or holding a flag. My skin baked and my feet roasted in my old steel-toes.

  At the end of the day, I’d drive under the limit and take in the sight of the light dyeing everything pink and blue, the rock and the sand, the fields of citrus. I’d park at the house and find Candace playing with the other children in a yard nearby while Felicia sat watching and chatting in Spanish with another woman, who may have been her sister. I’d fetch Candace, and if anything bad had happened that day, Felicia would tell me, but usually I’d just wave and she’d smile and wave, too. Then Candace and I would go inside, and I’d get her some juice and open myself a beer. I’d have a quick shower. We’d debate what to have for dinner but usually just open a can of spaghetti, then watch some TV together. At bedtime we’d read a book or two, then she’d lie in the dark and talk to her unicorn awhile before drifting off, whereupon I would watch some more TV, and maybe chat with Shona on the phone. And that was life. It wasn’t a bad one.

  A seam of sadness still ran through it, though.

  I rattled around feeling like I was waiting for the last piece to fall into place. At first I assumed that last piece was the radio job, but as the days passed I was more and more certain that I wasn’t going to find myself in the employ of STAR 100.9. That disappointed me, but it didn’t tarnish things so completely. The truth was, I didn’t mind working the roads. What was actually missing, of course, was Shona’s company.

  The feeling was made harder by our telephone calls. Her voice soothed me, but it also made me desperate for her skin, her smell, her eyes. I wanted to feel her presence, not just to know how she was getting on in Ottawa.

  “Shon, is this enough for you?” I asked her one night.

  “It’s what we have.”

  “You remember what I asked you?”

  “I’m not forgetting it. I know the invitation’s open.”

  “It is. It is open. I hope you’ll think about it some more.”

  “I could hardly think about it more, babe.”

  “But no decision yet.”

  “It’s a complicated thing, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  ***

  I got high one night with my new neighbours, Joe and Mercedes. They lived two doors down, in a little house with an enormous cactus out front. I’d see them around a lot because Joe was a programmer who worked from home and Mercedes was home-schooling their two, Annabel and Sonny. Annabel and Candace sometimes played together, which was how I got to talking with Joe.

  Joe said I ought to come over for a drink one night, so I did. I put Candace down to sleep and cracked her window and then slipped out. When I got to their house, Joe and Mercedes were on their front step, drinking wine and laughing. “The Canadian!” Joe said.

  I had the sense pretty quickly that he was the kind to watch you eat an apple and then tell you that you were doing it wrong because you didn’t eat the core. I wasn’t far off—but he was all right. Kind of funny about his cynicism. He made me laugh.

  “Good evening, Joe,” I said.

  He introduced me to Mercedes, who I’d seen around but hadn’t yet spoken to. She was dark-haired and her face was lined and her cool, green eyes were sad but not unfriendly. Mercedes, I’d learn, was the optimistic one, the one who’d invite their kids to paint giant sunshines on their bedroom walls and then smile at the messy results.

  She said, “Is your little one sleeping?”

  I said yes, and pointed to the glow of her nightlight in the window.

  “She’s a sweet little girl,” Mercedes said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “She’s everything to me.”

  They both smiled at this, and were silent. I felt that they were thinking of their children, of how important Sonny and Annabel were to their lives.

  “Yours are asleep?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Mercedes said. “They were tired. We don’t enforce a bedtime. We let them decide when they’re ready for bed. We find that way they don’t resent it. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what they want.”

  “We believe in self-direction,” said Joe.

  “And it works? I just imagine my girl would try to stay up all night.”

  “She’d get used to it,” Joe said, smiling.

  I nodded and tried to seem open to such ideas, but thought to myself that it wasn’t a thing I’d ever do. Maybe it was common sense, or maybe it was an old, rusty idea to which I was welded, but I thought kids needed a bedtime. I still do.

  Something about Mercedes and Joe backed up this idea I’d had about Yuma being on the edge of things. They were experimenting with everything. They felt like old rules didn’t apply to them. It inspired in me a mix of envy and pity that I would never have expressed to them.

  “You need a drink,” Joe said. “What can we get you? Beer? Wine? Something more exotic?”

  “I’d take a beer, Joe,” I said.

  He nodded and bounded up the steps and into the house, letting the screen door slap behind him.

  “Tell me something about Canada,” Mercedes said. “We’ve never been.”

  “There are a lot more trees than there are here,” I said, and smiled.

  “And snow?”

  “In winter. Where I’m from, the winters are long and hard. Lots of snow.”

  “I guess you just get used to it,” she said. “I can’t imagine it.”

  “It’s just life there,” I said. “It can be fun.”

  Joe banged back out the door and handed me a bottle I didn’t recognize. “Drink local,” he said.

  I don’t think Joe was yet forty, but he had some miles on him. His bushy, greying hair stuck out from beneath a weathered tweed flat cap, his quick brown eyes set deep in his lined, tanned face. He had a grey goatee that drew attention to his mouth, which always looked on the verge of saying something.

  The night seemed very dark then, though warm and soft. We huddled beneath the lamp on the front step of their small home and talked about our children because it was something we had in common.

  “I hope you won’t mind me asking,” Mercedes said, “but where is Candace’s mother?”

  “That’s a story,” I said. “Well, she had some trouble soon after Candace was born, and we couldn’t find any way to help her. She went away for a while and then tried to come back, but it wasn’t any good. And our families agreed, you know, that it would be best if I took care of Candace. And a judge agreed that that was true.”

  “Oh, Russ, I’m sorry I asked.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s what happened. I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she’s better. I hope we did the right thing for her.”

  Things were quiet for a few moments after that. Finally Joe broke the silence to talk about computers. Mercedes asked if there was anyone new in my life. “I think so,” I said.

  Joe got me another beer. Then he said, “Do you mind if we smoke, Russ?” I said no, of course I didn’t mind, so he took a small tin and a pack of papers from the pocket of his New York Yankees sweatshirt and rolled quickly and expertly. He was an artist, a practised one. He looked me in the eyes while his fingers worked mechanically, producing the smoothest, tightest joint I had ever seen.

  Mercedes asked if I ever got high.

  “I have no policy against it,” I said.

  So we passed the thing around while we sat quietly, listening to the dogs bark and to the cars whoosh by on the highway. The night had had a pretty, sweet scent to it, but that was pushed aside by the strong smell of our smoking.

  Joe held the fumes for a long time, then let them slowly out, and laughed. Mercedes giggled.

  “Our small reward,” he said.

  “There isn’t much left to us, is there?”

  “Are you happy, Russ?” Mercedes asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m getting close, maybe,” I said. “I believe it’s possible to be happy. That marks a bit of a change for me.”

  “Good for you,” she said, and leaned forward t
o pat my arm, then handed me the joint.

  “I have something else for us,” Joe said. “Just give me a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What the hell.” It was getting late, but I was enjoying myself. I’d feel it the next day, but I could muddle through and then maybe I could let Candace watch TV while I fell asleep in the early evening.

  After a few quiet minutes Joe came back out with a bottle and three small glasses. Tapatio, said the bottle. It was tequila. Joe poured the drinks, doled them out, then lifted his glass high. “Death or glory,” he said, downing it in one jerk of his head.

  “Death or glory,” said Mercedes, and she tipped her glass back.

  “Death is gory,” I said, and gulped mine down. It was smooth fire in my gullet. Joe immediately began pouring more.

  Just before the third shot, I heard what I knew right away to be Candace’s voice, in the way all parents know in such moments. She was crying terribly, sobs followed by a shriek, and then she was saying, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  My heart left my chest. My face must have been something to see, because Mercedes didn’t have to ask. She said, “Oh, Russ, go, go go.”

  I tore across the lawn, dodging the cactus, in through the front door, then right around the bend to Candace’s room. I threw on the light and saw she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her face red, eyes wet. She was breathing hard. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she said, then huffed and huffed and sobbed on my shoulder as I picked her up.

  “I know,” I said, “I know. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay.”

  I walked over to the switch and put the light back out and lay her down, then climbed into bed with her. She curled into me. After a time, her choppy breathing smoothed out, her sobbing slowed.

  I felt awful that she’d found herself alone. I was angry with myself for that. Alone or cold: those are the two states that I can’t stand to think of her suffering. It kicks me in the stomach to think of it. I did not promise her it wouldn’t happen again, because it’s important to be realistic about such things. But I promised myself I’d try harder.