Leaving the car running with the heat turned all the way up, I stepped out and pulled on my gloves. It was an arctic morning, twenty below, and the air stung my nostrils, lashed my face. I walked over to the house, stepping over ruts and tire tracks, over the tree limbs that had fallen, bare and singed. The house was a blackened heap. There were patches, less burned, where I recognized features, and in the northeast corner a part of the roof was still held up by two partial walls, burned down to the studs but resilient. The smell of burned wood, plastic, chemically treated material, was overwhelming. I held my arm over my face.
The garage, which had been a shoddy addition to the original structure, was gone altogether. The siding on the garden shed, thirty feet away from the house, was melted and disfigured. Everywhere, the water from the firefighters’ hoses had refrozen into smooth shapes, coating the ground, filigreeing the edges of scorched things.
There were objects I recognized peeking from the mess, but they were sullied, or halved, or made grotesque. I saw a coffee mug with a football helmet on it, fused to a blob of misshapen metal which used to be a Thermos. I saw bits of colour that appeared to have been toys. I saw furniture without upholstery. Cutlery, twisted and maimed.
The sheer, useless mass of it all overwhelmed me.
I kicked over a piece of blackened drywall, heavy and frozen, from what I believe was the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. There had been a bookshelf there, but I could see no trace of that. Under the Gyproc I discovered a banker’s box that had sat on the lowest shelf. Half of the box was more or less gone, scorched and then dissolved by the hoses’ water, but when I flipped the lid open, the contents were still recognizable. I took off my gloves, despite the cold, and leafed through them. There were instruction booklets and old bills, a few takeout menus. Most of the papers were swollen and stiff, but still legible. Some were frozen together.
And then, tucked between a Christmas card from a cousin and a drawing of a horse by Candace, there was a photograph.
The photo was curled and a bit stained, but otherwise pristine. In it, Shona and I stand side by side on the Painted Desert Trail, a wall of beautiful pink stone behind us, ochre dust beneath our feet. I am ducking somewhat, as though worried the camera—which I had propped up on a rock before setting the timer—would cut off my head. To my left, Shona is holding a bottle of water in her right hand, clutching it to her stomach. She is wearing denim shorts and a red T-shirt, sandals on her feet, and large, dark sunglasses on her face. I am on her right, wearing khaki shorts, a checked shirt, and sneakers. My left arm is over her shoulder. I have a kind of inadvertent smirk on my face. Shona is smiling.
When the photo was taken, I believed we wanted the same things. I believed we would have them. And I thought that was how we must have looked to the world, to anyone who cared to see: like a pair, matched, together. I thought anyone who looked at that photo would see the love and the heat coming off us like rays. But it was incomplete—like any photo is, I suppose—because it failed to show those things roiling and churning beneath the surface. Nor did it make visible those things beyond the frame, the countless, inconstant things broadcasting their signals to our too-susceptible hearts.
It hurt me, that cold morning amid the smouldering ashes, to look at that. We were two people who had made each other better for a short time. It’s difficult not to mourn such a thing.
I held the picture between my fingers. Then I stood, walked back to the car, and tucked it into the glovebox. And then I drove away with Candace. I have never been back to that spot.
Pharaohs
ANA RAE CAVERS squinted against the glare, fitted the toe of her right boot into the ski’s binding, pressed down, and felt it click home. Then she did the same with her left.
The snow was only a few inches deep atop the lake. It had been a strange winter. She pushed out onto the ice, poling ahead, then gliding her feet after. The skiing was good across the surface, despite the strong wind whistling into her small bay through the pinched mouth that was bracketed by low, pine-topped rocks. She felt the cold carve right through her many layers of clothing. It was the coldest day of the winter to date. At midday it was still the temperature at which materials give up their characteristics and become hard, or brittle, cracking along heretofore invisible faults.
Her red skis created twin clefts in the perfect, clean snow. She leaned forward, her shoulders twinging on the odd pull-stroke. It took tremendous effort, but every so often the glide was right, and she moved as though a hand took her by the scruff of the neck and pulled her along, releasing her from all struggle and obligation.
Her face was pale and bloodless in that ungodly cold, her eyes like faint blue marbles in saucers of milk. Ice clung to her upper lip and coated her eyelashes, though she began to feel, as she skied on, a dampness in her grey hair and down her strong back from the exertion required to keep moving.
Ski trails criss-crossed the ice, but she seldom saw other skiers. Their tracks were like evidence of another civilization. Sometimes they lingered for days; other times a mean wind erased them nearly as quickly as they were put down. The tracks were cut every so often by the patterns left by snowmobiles, their twin front skis and rear central tracks. She saw the snowmobiles sometimes, too, great bands of them on weekends, ripping across the ice, making their throaty and whiny noise, kicking up clouds of snow. There were none today. It was a Tuesday.
Her twin sister, Sabina, was at that moment down in Florida, as she was every November through April. Ana Rae drove down every few years and enjoyed the break, but she didn’t see how her enjoyment could do anything but diminish if she were to stay longer. Sabina—whose blond hair was, to a stranger, the only thing to distinguish her from Ana Rae—didn’t see it that way. She hated winter and suggested every year that Ana Rae stay with her in Sarasota until the snow was gone.
But though the cold cracked the skin of her fingers, causing a searing pain when she plunged her hands into hot dishwater, and though the darkness felt at times interminable, Ana Rae knew she’d never give up her winters. They were so harshly beautiful, and somehow necessary to her sense of herself. The specific comfort of sitting by the woodstove with a glass of Chilean wine and a new book to read was not, she felt, duplicable in Florida.
The house where she lived those winters, as well as the humid, buggy summers, was barely a house at all. It was a cabin, a cottage. She and Jack had built it twenty-five years ago, shared it for only a few before he was gone. It began as a shack, twelve by twelve, with a roof and not much more. They’d added to it as they could afford the materials to do so, but even now, in its finished state, it lacked air conditioning, central heating, and running water in the winter. Every November she shut down the pump, hauled the foot valve from the lake, and poured antifreeze down the drains. For most purposes she’d be on bottled water until May, though she kept an old white enamel pot on the woodstove and added handfuls of snow to it as it melted down. This she used to wash her dishes.
They’d done their best to insulate the house, though it had resisted their efforts. Frost furred certain spots on the floor, around doors, beneath the kitchen counter. The stove burned all winter, and she had a half-dozen little radiant parabolic heaters spaced throughout the place, including one on either side of the bed. There were a couple she had to be careful not to run at the same time or she’d blow a fuse, so she went from room to room turning them on and off as she moved through her day. There was another heater in the outhouse, strung off a fifty-foot extension cord. She used to let it run all the time, until she got sick of what it did to her electric bills; after that, she adopted the habit of plugging in the end of the cord, letting it heat up the small plywood box of an outhouse a few minutes before she would head out and down the little path. It didn’t stop the cold from reaching up the hole, of course, but it was bearable. Anything is, if you’re used to it.
She put up with all this because she valued nothing so highly as the silence the place afforded her. Her nearest
neighbours, resident only on summer weekends, were on the far side of the bay, two hundred yards across the water and obscured by jack pines growing on a pair of tiny islands. The fire route on which she lived snaked by on the landward side, behind a hunk of Canadian Shield granite that more or less blocked the sound of the few vehicles which used the road. Most of what she heard all day was noise of her own making, or the birds in the oaks and pines surrounding the house, or the small ticking of the stove. She sometimes listened to the CBC on the transistor, for news and weather.
Ana Rae considered herself lucky to have made a life which so suited her desire to be alone. She missed Jack, of course, but knew that what she actually missed was a time in her life when they’d shared the project of life-building, and more things had seemed possible.
The ice—ten inches thick at least; she’d checked yesterday with the auger—settled invisibly, moving against itself, popping and groaning as it did so. It sounded at times like a penny dropped on a drumhead, other times like a plucked bass string, the dying reverberations of which could be felt in the feet. She was out on the open lake now, and its flatness spread out from her in every direction.
He had hit her, once. The children were still young. Afterwards, nothing was outwardly different. Inside everything had changed.
Out in the unobstructed wind there were patches of ice scoured clean of snow, windows down into the black water beneath, reminders that this was not simply flat ground. She passed the spot where she liked to swim in the summer, a small island of little more than rock and a few trees, with a stone ledge off of which she could dive into water that was forty feet deep. She’d last swum there in September, and it would likely be June before she could do it again.
After Jack was gone, others—Sabina, friends—kept putting men in her path, insisting she give them a chance. And there had been a man, just one. She and this man met several times, found each other’s company tolerable, and eventually fumbled toward a single, unpleasant sexual encounter, after which they simply didn’t speak again. It seemed to her, even at the time, like a mistake. It simply didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a part of her own life.
She sought nothing actively now, but saw how it was periodically necessary to pull in the nets she’d long ago set and suss out what she’d caught. Which was why she was headed across the ice now, to the far shore, to meet another man. As content as she was in her hermitage, she retained some stubborn residue of that girl’s upbringing which taught her that her value lay in the willingness of men to pay attention to her. One did, so she was making her way toward him.
The thought of it seeped into a place directly between her shoulders, rode there on a blast of cold wind, and she hated the effort she was making. She could turn around now and invent some barrier to her visit, but she hated that thought, too. Straight-ahead in all things was how she meant to live now. To shear off all trite and sly exchanges. She would keep the appointment, but cut it short. One cup of tea, then back on her skis. That suited her, or nearly did anyway.
Richard, the man she was meeting, had bought a four-season place on the main road last summer. She’d run into him several times at the grocery store and three times out on the ice, skiing. He’d persisted with invitations, and now she was relenting. He seemed fine. Anyway, he apparently liked winter. She favoured hardy people, capable, sensible, and she thought he might prove to be some of those things.
Richard’s house was on a point on the northwestern shore of the lake. From her house, in its shallow and tucked-away bay on the eastern edge, she could not see the spot. Once out on the open lake, though, it would come into view, low against the great concave sky and all the airy blue emptiness held there.
He would want to talk about their respective children. It was always the first topic, the thing that could be counted upon, the most obvious thing they had in common. She was not excited for this. It would feel to her like a desultory obligation, a shabby and half-hearted thing. Her children were like strangers to her now. She loved them, of course, and wished them well, but she observed them in their adult lives like they were characters on a television show. She was, quite honestly, only mildly curious about the details of their lives.
She could be honest with him and tell him that what she remembered most viscerally of her early motherhood was the loneliness, the suddenness and violence of her decentring, the guilt which attended it. Sitting in waiting rooms or on buses or walking grocery store aisles, aware that she’d gone from being herself to being this child’s mother. How small it had made her feel. Ana Rae was cognizant, when raising her children, that much of her effort would come to nothing, and sometimes that knowledge brought out a panic or desperation she could barely contain. She just had to hold on until they could go off on their own, invent themselves—needed mostly just to feed and care for them. The rest happened, or it didn’t.
Samantha was their first, when Jack was still substitute teaching. She was a confident, sprightly child who had to be chased. Ana Rae was exhausted, always. Then, eighteen months later, after Jack had found full-time work in a middle school, came Stephen. He was a needy and fragile, emotionally voracious child. As an adult, he still fit those descriptions.
When Jack died, the children were already in their twenties and, after some false starts, off on their own for good. At that point, being alone was no longer something Ana Rae could choose —it was the only way her life would be, unless she endeavoured by some brave orchestration to change it. But she did not wish to.
The house was still new then, and she spread out in it and took it as her shell. She spent the summers swimming and the autumns cutting wood, the winters skiing out on the ice, listening for signs that the lake was about to open up and swallow her. Ana Rae felt herself coming into her own with that new openness, that space all to herself. She was returning to the centre. Her life felt like something she had lent away so long ago that she’d forgotten about it, until it was given back to her. She found she’d missed it terribly.
When Ana Rae reached shore, she poked her bindings with the tips of her poles and stepped off her skis. Richard’s house offered a flat wall of glass to the lake, high up, looking down; he stood at a window, waving to her. She stuck her skis in a mound of snow, her poles next to them, and started up toward the door. He opened it, said hello in a clear, sweet voice.
Richard was dressed in a finely combed cardigan, old jeans, and tasselled slippers, and he had a full head of silver hair which swooped up away from his face. He was handsome, and he knew it. The net result placed him at a deficit. His vanity was instantly obvious. She didn’t know how she’d missed it when they’d met earlier. It was on his face. His hands were soft.
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her into the entranceway of his large home. The central heat belched from vents all around her. An enormous stone fireplace stood at the far end of the room, unused. She unlaced her ski boots, shed her layers—hat, gloves, neck warmer, coat, snow pants—and placed them on a padded bench. Beneath, she was damp and ruddy from the trip over. The feeling came back into her toes painfully.
“What a day. Coldest this year, I think,” he said.
“I believe it is,” she said.
“You could have cancelled. You must be frozen.”
“I’m fine. Been here long enough to know how to dress for the cold.”
“Of course,” he said. He strode up three steps and into the kitchen, which looked down over the sunken living area and the bank of south-facing windows beyond, and placed a kettle on the range. “Come and sit,” he said, and stretched out his arm, the end of which gestured to an overstuffed sofa.
She perched, cross-legged, her right knee pointed at him in a bid to discourage proximity. You could have cancelled, he’d said. The cold.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. He was the only thing she’d seen move that day other than a large pileated woodpecker on a dead oak by her shoreline. He moved elaborately, showily. He spoke with his hands, and his face
was comically expressive.
She recognized the dance. The dance had not changed.
Before Jack hit her that once—sober, so it hurt more—she’d thought him nearly perfect. He was far from it, but it took a while to learn that. At best, he was closer to perfect than ninety-nine percent of them. But that still left far too much room. Attractive men—by which she meant handsome, capable, not stupid, kind, selfless—were exceedingly rare. Lightning struck with greater reliability. The rest were silly, their motives embarrassingly transparent.
“Tell me about your children,” Richard said, on cue. The kettle began to sing. He stood and danced up the three steps to remove it from the heat.
“They’re grown,” she said.
“Yes, so are mine. Do you hear from them often?”
“Often enough.” She checked her email once a week at the small public library in town, and usually there was a note or two from her children, which she dutifully answered. There were phone calls around birthdays and holidays, too, and to her mind that was enough. She saw the angle from which such thinking appeared uncharitable, but she’d long ago stopped caring about such angles and gave no effort to meet them.
After she and Jack had finished the house, they set about building a garage, closer to the road, next to the granite outcropping. A place to store fishing rods and tools and cans of motor oil, and stow the twelve-foot aluminum boat in the winter. When they were done putting it up, they stood inside looking at the uninsulated ceiling and exposed beams, and Jack said, Those are suicide rafters. She did not laugh with him. Having so recently come back to herself, she felt it in terribly poor taste to even discuss such wilful violence to one’s own person. She held that comment against Jack until he died.
Seated in his light pine-panelled sunken living space, Richard offered her many such opportunities for resentment. He was generous with them. The one she found most difficult to let go came when he returned with her mug of tea, set it down in front of her, and said, “Don’t you feel you owe them everything? That they’re the reason you’re here?”
Lands and Forests Page 17
