Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

  “You’re with me.”

  “Right. I know. Life’s funny.”

  “That hurts a bit,” I said.

  “You’re just not the kind of man I ever pictured myself with.”

  “I’m not supposed to find that hurtful?”

  “It just is. It’s a thing that is. You don’t have to think of it as hurtful, unless you want to. And you seem to want to.”

  I poured myself more wine. She did the same, after downing the rest of her glass. I was beginning to recognize the parameters of the conversation, its scale, its shape. It wasn’t just about her ankle. Or about Yuma.

  She sat on the bed, cross-legged, and ran a towel over her hair. She smelled like a tropical greenhouse.

  “Maybe I just see us differently than you do,” I said.

  “I think that’s obvious, baby. We don’t see the world just the same way. You’re stern so much of the time, like you don’t trust happiness.”

  “The truth is I’m not even sure I know what it is,” I said.

  “It means feeling good, you sweet fool.”

  “Things that don’t feel good can also be good for you. That’s something I believe. Responsibilities.”

  “But too many of those things?”

  “How do you know how many is too many? How do you know when something isn’t going to be good for you, which things to keep working for?”

  Those were real questions I asked myself from time to time.

  “It’s okay to try things out, Russ. To see where they go. It’s okay to be unsure, then try anyway, then decide it isn’t the thing you need. Why wouldn’t we do the things that make us happiest?”

  I realized then that she’d been seeing my willingness to pull up stakes—Ottawa, Watertown, Yuma—as an indication that I approached life as she did. She thought that I had been exchanging one life for another, in order to be happy.

  But the truth was I wanted constancy. To always to have my people in my life. Candace. Shona. In changing my surroundings, I was only trying to find the right venue for us to begin our efforts in earnest. I wanted to find the one permanent place.

  I sighed and shifted, tilted my head back, squeezed my eyes shut a moment.

  “I’m close to drunk,” I said. “Join me?”

  “I’m getting there,” she said, taking another gulp.

  I was glad to hear it, though the wine wasn’t delivering me the sense of ease I’d hoped it would. I was on edge, and I knew she sensed that. I hoped more wine would loosen us up.

  Everything changes. I forget that from time to time. I had certainly forgotten it with respect to Shona. I’d let myself believe we’d arrived at a lovely, endless plateau. I was lulled into believing we’d left change behind us.

  She was looking at the bottom of her glass. “Russ,” she said. “What a day.”

  “Truth. Can we forget it?”

  “No. But we can maybe improve the ending a bit.”

  “What do you want, Shona?” I sat up and put my face close to hers. “Tell me what you want, baby.”

  She drained her glass, then looked at me and smiled. “I want you to fuck me like I deserve it,” she said.

  “You do.”

  “Then fuck me like you deserve it.”

  She shed her towel and moved on top of me.

  We were not young, but we were not dead. Our skin still invited touch. She was furious. I was on fire.

  It reminded me of the first time we were together, when our recklessness imperfectly reflected our bodies’ desperation, expressed our lurking suspicions that we’d already become old before we’d even had a chance to feel young, that we’d already known our allotments of tenderness, of sweetness, of moist, red lust. It was obvious to me then, that first time, that she saw me as I saw myself in infrequent, optimistic, usually drunken moments. I’d found my best reflection, and she was beautiful. I never wanted it to end.

  This time, the desperation had a different quality. For me, it was one of trying to claw something back. For her, it was one of finality, of fighting for breath, of emerging, of finding a way out from beneath a weight. We bit and pulled and struggled. I didn’t know if it was to be our last time—not with certainty, though the fear was there. I was always concerned that she’d wise up and move past me, but now it was more immediate, sadder and angrier and more frantic. I was fighting for her.

  ***

  As it happened, it wasn’t our last time. We entwined like that almost nightly for two weeks. When we weren’t in bed, we got along amiably, though I became aware that we spoke in different terms, avoiding all talk of the future, using words to place a small buffer between our lives. The basic truth of us had been altered, and I knew that Shona, in her heart, was bound for elsewhere.

  The days grew hotter and the nights more still, and the stars seemed to burn more intensely. The mounting heat and the breathless evenings rubbed up against the new, strange distance that had crept between us to create something spiky, something that threatened to combust. It was, for those weeks, our bodies which burned. There was a permanent sheen on my brow, and the dry air made her hair feel brittle. But that did not prevent me from wanting to sink my hands deep into it, my face, my nose.

  Our daytime selves, though, were going to have to be reckoned with sooner or later. We both knew it. The wide-awake versions of us, with so many practical concerns in mind and so many sober hours to contend with, would be the ones making the decisions. And Shona’s daytime self seemed, to me, completely resigned to the end of whatever it was we had.

  There was no descent into acrimony—a small thing of which I am nonetheless proud. I have never sought to turn love to hate with anyone I’ve ever known, including Candace’s mother. I just never saw that as desirable. I understand, of course, that people don’t just look at the one they love and say, One day I’ll hate her. Love runs its course, and then they find something much different residing in their heart.

  My heart remained steady, and I think Shona’s did, too; at least, I believe it did not do a complete reversal. She still felt tenderness toward me, still had access to that place in her heart she’d once put me. But now she knew what she was up against. She would never be the only girl in my heart, would never represent my sole concern. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as someone’s sole concern, I think that’s normal. And I expect it scared her, showed her all at once just how vulnerable she was. Her reaction was to pull back, to protect herself.

  None of this was said aloud. There was no explicit conversation about us drifting apart. She did not tell me, Russ, I’m having doubts. Instead, it was in the set of her shoulders, in the avoided instances of contact. There were no more hands on my back as I stood in the kitchen, no pecks on the cheek. I noticed such things because they had once been so abundant.

  What I should have done was pushed. I see that now. I don’t know if it would have swayed her, but at least I’d have tried.

  ***

  The end came on a Monday evening. We’d put Candace to bed and were sitting on chairs in the kitchen, talking about what we’d have for dinner the rest of the week. It was such a regular conversation. Just a man and a woman discussing groceries. Then there was a lull.

  “Russ, I don’t think I can keep doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  She put her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. “I’m sorry. I wanted us to work. But if I’m being honest, it’s not. It’s just not working for me. And I don’t believe it will.”

  “So. You’re, uh. You’re going? You’re going to leave?”

  “It can’t seem sudden to you, babe,” she said, lifting her eyes to me. “It hasn’t felt right, has it?”

  “I figured growing pains.”

  “Baby.”

  “I had dreams of marrying you.”

  “You’re going to be okay. Do you hear me? I promise you’re going to be okay. You’ll always have her.”

  I cried then. Shona took me to bed and we lay there and held
one another, which was strange and comforting and painful at once.

  In the morning, she simply left. She kissed Candace on the forehead and me on the mouth, touched my face, and was gone in the taxi before I could even get my bearings. She flew out of Yuma, and I doubt she will ever return there. From what I understand, she stayed in Ottawa for a time before heading to Toronto, where she waits tables when she isn’t teaching yoga. I do not know if she is attached. I do not believe she has any children.

  Why do we have so much trouble knowing what we want? Or keeping it once we do know?

  I had once believed—sincerely and fervently—that I wanted Yuma as a home, but it began looking quite different to me in the wake of Shona’s departure. A place still on the edge, yes, but maybe too much so. Too barren, too open, too spare. It was a desert town full of itinerants and dogs. It was a place to be, but not a place to stay. It just wasn’t a home of any kind, not for me; and though I was glad Candace could say, later in her life, I lived in Arizona, it wasn’t the home I wanted for her either.

  I did not sleep well after Shona flew away. Yuma had become a venue of loss for me, and I was done with it. I needed only to settle the question of where to be next. And because I could come up with no new answers, I fell back on an old one.

  ***

  When Candace was a baby and her mother and I were still together, we lived in eastern Ontario, in rural idyll. There was a station in Kemptville where I kept things running as best as possible with limited resources. We did farm reports and played Top 40 music, ran syndicated programming overnight from seven to five. My commute into town took me ten minutes, down a few gravel roads and a two-lane highway that snaked along next to the South Branch of the Rideau River. We had a staff of six. The office administrator also handled ad accounts. The custodian hosted the noon show.

  I returned each evening to our two treed acres and the slumping ranch-style house thereupon, to my wife and our baby. On spring nights the peepers sent up a chorus from the fields and wetlands, and in the fall we’d wake at first light to the sound of the hunters’ rifles. It was a small, not unenjoyable life.

  But it hadn’t been enough to hold off the things lurking in our margins. Our marriage exploded, and then my wife went away, and I found myself bringing up Candace by myself. It was a hard few years, I’ll admit.

  Yet despite all that, for me eastern Ontario retained an Edenic quality, as sheltered and quiet and desirable. There was an honesty about the place and the people there. A straightforwardness. I still had friends there, and contacts. I was still well thought of. People were eager to help me resettle, to beat life into some sort of shape that might aid me and nurture Candace. It felt for all the world that a second crack at a life there would be a good thing.

  So Kemptville was where we began anew. In the back of my mind, of course, I knew that I was trying to resettle not only into an old place, but into the person I had once been, before Yuma, before Shona. Such is a faulty premise upon which to build a life, but I didn’t see any other choice.

  I was hired on at the Home Hardware, in the yard and working the contractors’ counter. I also made some overtures to my old employers at the station. If anything opens up, they said, and I believe they were sincere.

  For a few months, we rented a damp and sour townhouse on the edge of town. Then I put some money down on a bungalow in the country, at the edge of what had been a pine plantation. The house occupied a corner lot where two concessions met. Behind, to the east, lay empty fields gone to hay. Regularly spaced rows of mast-straight red pines ran to the south. In among them had grown thickets of cedar and some maple. It was August, sweet-smelling and hot, by the time we moved in. Candace was due to begin kindergarten in September. We had a month to make a home, just the two of us.

  Next door, perhaps two hundred yards away, lay a brick house, similarly nestled among the shading trees. It was owned by the Meachams, Cal and Julie. Cal I’d known a bit, once upon a time. He drove a snowplow for the township. Julie taught at the high school. Their daughter was in her teens, and in the back of my mind I flagged her as a potential babysitter, if I ever again had a need for one.

  Autumn dropped suddenly, in late September, the world going rust-coloured. Candace was in the middle of a growth spurt, stretching out her limbs, taking her from the round little girl I’d known into a whippet-lean kid, with just her apple-cheeked grin to remind me of the bundle she’d only recently been. I found her a snowsuit at the Salvation Army, hoped she wouldn’t outgrow it in that first winter.

  Yuma, though never all that far from my mind, was starting to feel like a distant memory. I wondered if I’d ever know anything like it again. I doubted it, if I was being honest with myself.

  I thought, though, that Candace and I might have something good in Kemptville: fine lives which left us content, and not impacted by tragedy. Cal and Julie had us over from time to time for barbecues and, once winter settled in, to watch Saturday-evening hockey on their big screen, eating stews made of the game Cal had taken over the fall.

  By the time the snow fell, we thought we had ourselves something like a home. But then Christmas passed, and January was hard. Mountains of snow, worse than I’d remembered, with a half-dozen snow days that shut down the school buses, sending me scrambling to make arrangements. The house was terribly drafty. In some rooms it felt as though someone had left a window open. I brought home parabolic space heaters from the hardware store, one for each room, two in the kitchen. Candace wore leggings beneath her pants, and heavy fleece pyjamas with socks. In the mornings, while I waited for the coffee maker, I stood blowing into my cupped hands and wiggling my toes in my wool socks.

  One night in the middle of February, I woke around two with an acrid smell in my mouth and nose. I knew immediately what it was, and did not check to be sure. I went to Candace and I picked her up, along with the stuffed menagerie she was clutching in her arms. I gathered her to me and made my way to the front door, stuffed animals spilling to the floor as we went. I could see a glow coming from the back room, and heard a low roaring sound, and the sound and the light were creeping toward the kitchen with a dreadful sort of desire.

  Candace woke in my arms and began sobbing, sensing my panic, the way children can. I grabbed our coats on our way out the door, wrapped her in hers, and put her in the car. I started the engine and turned the heat all the way up, for it was a bitterly cold night, and backed the car down the lane until it was out on the edge of the gravel road. There, I pulled my coat on and told Candace that everything was okay, everything would be fine, just please sit tight. Then I walked toward the house to see if anything could be done. But of course nothing could.

  Flames had reached the roof. The living room windows were glowing orange, and something—perhaps paint cans in the garage—was popping like dried kernels. I ran through the trees and snow to the Meachams’. Their garage light, hooked up to a motion sensor, flared on, and Homer, their German shepherd, began to bark. I pounded on their front door, and when Julie Meacham answered in a robe, I said, “My house is on fire. Could you call it in?”

  “Oh my God, of course,” she said. “Candace?”

  “With me. She’s all right. We’re all right.”

  Then I stood in the lane. Candace was behind me, in the idling car, probably needing me, needing to be reassured. But I kept on standing alone there, feeling as though I was losing my mind. It was hard to understand what was happening in front of me, even as I witnessed it. Our entire material life was now fuel. Books and clothes. Tools. Candace’s toys. I wondered what, in this life, would prove durable.

  The trucks came shortly, two of them, from Kemptville. “These goddamn prefabs are made of paper,” I heard one of the firefighters say, and what I witnessed bore that out. Even as I stood in the lane, people in thick uniforms and gear racing about me, the house was completely consumed. The cedar hedge to the north of the little house caught, and it began to fizzle and pop, as did a maple in the yard whose branches hung ove
r the roof, its limbs soon falling from it into the blaze. Embers drifted up toward the needles of the pines, and I thought it only a matter of moments before we had a forest fire on our hands.

  But that never came about. After a time, I went to the car and got in the back seat with my baby. I held her and we cried together and I said, “The important thing is that you’re not hurt. You’re okay. We’re okay.” I could feel the heat on my face and her tears falling onto me.

  The police put us in a motel on the other side of the highway. I lay with Candace, and she cried and asked me questions for which I had no answers. Eventually we got some sleep, though not much.

  In the morning, I drove us out to the house to survey the damage. Along the way, the bare trees looked like cut crystal as the sun shone through the frost which had settled there in the night. The sky was high and bright, and the snow sparkled. Were it not for our circumstances, I’d have seen beauty in all of it.

  There was still smoke rising from the ashes when I pulled into the long drive, tight against the row of cedars. Some of them had burned to their stumps. I sat there a moment, looking at the way the absence of the house changed the view of the property and the trees, the fields beyond. It was a pretty spot, I realized, one that had been profaned when the bungalow was dropped there. I tried to imagine what might rise next, if anything, and in that moment I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to rebuild. I’d let the bank and the insurance company work out what to do with it.

  Candace sat in the back seat, hugging her unicorn and her Hello Kitty. She did not ask to come out of the car. In fact, she appeared to shrink when I looked at her, as though worried I’d ask her to come out with me.

  “I’ll be just over there,” I said, looking back at her over my shoulder. “Will you be okay here? For a minute?”

  She nodded.