by Wayne Grady
As it turns out, Jimmy Crimson isn’t such a nice guy after all. He doesn’t have a work boat, as would be expected of a contractor; he has a speedboat on which he zips around the coast, even crosses to Quadra Island and Campbell River when he feels like it, running errands the precise nature of which no one quite knows. Liquor or drugs is the local guess, but so what, that’s just Jimmy, he’ll settle down. Or get caught. Most of the locals are draft dodgers whose concept of civic responsibility has been permanently altered. They’re survivors. Daphne can see immediately how the daughter would be attracted to a man like Jimmy Crimson. He sells himself as a big-time entrepreneur, a man going places, but he’s basically a con artist. The father isn’t taken in. He tells Crimson he’s not interested, to stop coming around. He came here to get away from all that, he and his daughter are happy selling carrots and cauliflowers at the market. But Jimmy goes to the municipal council and tells them how many jobs his resort would create, how much tax revenue the village could rake in, how many trickle-down benefits there would be—fishing charters, photography and whale tours, artisanal boutiques, restaurants, maybe a second hotel for the overflow from his own place. Just as members of the council are on their way out to the property to try to persuade the father to change his mind, the script slips from Daphne’s hand and wakes her up. She puts the coffee mug and the bound pages on the night table, blows out the candle, and goes back to sleep.
In the morning, Tom says they’ll have to do most of their shooting away from the water, otherwise the changing tideline will screw up continuity. He shows her two photographs on his phone: the shore at noon, with its tumble of rocks, and the same view at six o’clock, all water and no rocks. Daphne says they could film the rising and falling tide to establish mood; there’s something about slowly rising water, she finds, that makes people apprehensive, conveys tension.
“There’s an element of foreboding about an island, isn’t there,” Tom agrees, “as if everyone on it accepts that one day the tide will just keep rising and rising until the whole place is under water. We were fools to build here, they’ll say, as they wait for the water to recede so they can rebuild in the same place. I read an article about the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Japan. Bodies had to be dug out of the mud with backhoes, schoolchildren buried under their own playgrounds, nothing ever found but a shoe stuck in the cleft of a tree. And the school rebuilt in exactly the same spot.”
“What are you going to call the film?” she asks him.
“Don’t know yet,” he says. “Maybe Channel Rock. What do you think?”
“There’s a book of poems by W.B. Yeats in the cabin,” she says. “There’s one called ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ that reminds me of this film. A father praying that his daughter will grow up undamaged by everything that life will fling at her, that she’ll retain what he calls radical innocence.”
“Hmm. Radical innocence.”
“The first line begins ‘Once more the storm is howling.’ I thought of it last night when I was on my way to the cabin and the wind was rocking the trees above the cove so much I thought they might come down. But of course they didn’t.”
They’re early for the ferry, so they park the SUV in the lineup and walk back to a small café across from the Co-op that serves coffee and baked goods, feeling conspicuous. She dreads people looking at them, assuming they’re a couple like that woman at the Co-op. She doesn’t know if she wants to be part of a couple, and having people assume that she is confuses her. She’d rather have waited in the car, but Tom wants to get a feel for the place and she goes with him. Most of the customers ignore them, but one of the younger men calls over and asks if they’re really going to be making a movie out at the old Douglas place. He has long, oily hair and is wearing a black T-shirt that sags enough at the neck to show the vine tattoo snaking up to his ear. Tom smiles and says they’re thinking about it.
“Woo-ee! Right on!” the man says. “You’re gonna need extras, right? Stunt men and stuff?”
“Some,” Tom says. “We’re not sure yet. But probably.”
“Hey look,” the man says, standing up. “I’m Bruno Gerussi.” He waves his arms in the air and pretends he’s falling backwards off a dock. “Whoa-oa-oa!” A few of the older men laugh. Tom laughs.
“Did you know Gilean Douglas?” Daphne asks him when he sits down again.
“Naw. Knew the holy rollers, though. Totally weird motherfuckers. Some of them used to sneak in here and get shit-faced on pub nights. They were okay.”
“Totally weird how?” asks Tom.
“Everyone sleeping with everyone, kids running around buck naked, no one knowing whose was whose. And they were all vegan, never spent a nickel in town, everything was barter, and they didn’t believe in plastic or paying taxes.” He shakes his head. “They used to take group showers and it’d just turn into one big orgy, the kids right there watching.”
“Sounds like you were watching, too, Reg,” says one of the older men. More laughter.
“What happened to them?” Daphne asks.
Reg shrugs. “They fucked off. One day they’re here, the next day they’re gone. Just like that.” He makes a fist and then opens his fingers. “Poof!”
“Did any of them stick around?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, did anyone move into town? Stay on the island?”
“Not that I know of.” He looks around at the other men. They all frown and shake their heads.
Tom looks at his watch. “We better get back to the car,” he says.
“Thanks,” she says to the man, to Reg. “Maybe we’ll see you later.”
“Right on!”
“You think someone’s hanging around the place?” Tom asks her as they walk back to the ferry line. When she doesn’t answer, he says, “I found your note.”
They stop and she looks up at him. “It was still there?” He nods. She tries to hide her disappointment. “What did you do with it?”
“I put it back on the table as we were leaving.”
“So you think there’s someone, too?”
He shrugs. “If there is,” he says, “they’re doing a good job.”
* * *
—
When she googles Gilean Douglas, she doesn’t find much. A brief Wikipedia bio, an academic paper on her nature writing that includes a few lines of her poetry. One, called “Moonset,” she liked a lot, she imagined it describing Channel Rock: “Between the starstream and the sea / a notion of lucidity.” Douglas was married four times, and the woman in the Co-op was right: none of her husbands hung around much longer than the honeymoon. The last one held out longer: Philip Major moved with her to Cortes in 1949, and they divorced in 1951. She finds two sentences from one of her books, The Protected Place, written after her move to Cortes Island. The protected place was Channel Rock. She copies the sentences out and pins them to the cork-board above her work table: “Nature is prodigal, but never wasteful. Even the most bizarre of her experiments have meaning and her endings are always beginnings.” They aren’t much, they aren’t even very profound, but she likes them. The part about endings and beginnings makes her think about her father.
* * *
—
She doesn’t hear from Tom for a month, but she isn’t worried. Then he calls and asks her to meet him for drinks. He has another assignment for her, if she’s interested. He wants to make a documentary about the fentanyl epidemic sweeping Vancouver, fifteen hundred deaths last year and more expected. Apparently the stuff is coming in from China, some through Mexico. Why are people injecting a known poison into their arms? “I’m going to call it ‘The Opioid Wars.’ What do you think?”
She starts trembling. She almost drops the phone. She can’t do this. She mustn’t. But she can, she knows she can, she’s perfect for it, she can give him all the locations he needs right now, over the phone, she
knows them by heart. Got a pen? The shooting galleries on East Hastings, the Westmoreland Hotel, the old Sussex Hotel, Oppenheimer Park. The lawyers who park on Railway Street at noon and shoot up in their cars. She can even give him some of their names. The missions on Alexander, the needle exchanges, the safe-injection sites. The morgue.
“I think it’s a great idea,” she says. “I might be able to help.”
“Great. Shall we say four o’clock at the bar in the Hotel Vancouver?”
“Sure.” They won’t recognize her. It’s been eight years.
She has taken on a scouting job with the CBC, but she’s never really stopped thinking about Channel Rock. Tom’s call brings back the sound of the wind and rain hitting the cabin door. She hasn’t slept as soundly since. It rains in Vancouver, but not like that. Vancouver rain falls through smoke-filled air and leaves black spots on her balcony deck. On Cortes, the rain felt more like a purification, like the life-giving substance water is supposed to be. No wonder the hippies took their clothes off, let their children run naked. Now that she’s back in the city, she realizes that the rattling and banging on the cabin could easily have masked the sound of someone approaching from the woods, her mysterious squatter, for example, but she blames Vancouver for the thought. It didn’t occur to her on the island.
The CBC gig is a special report on the likelihood of the Pacific Northwest being obliterated by an earthquake within the next thirty to fifty years. It’s an old story, she remembers hearing about it when she was at UBC, but they keep finding new ways to bring it up. They’re calling it “The Big One.” She nodded grimly as she read the treatment, yes, this is the kind of stuff she worries about all the time, the whole West Coast cross-hatched by fault lines, apparently on the verge of a major collapse. The biggest danger is the Cascadia subduction fault, three hundred miles offshore and seventy-two years overdue for a magnitude 9.0 quake. The smaller faults, closer to home, the Leech River fault that runs under Vancouver Island directly into downtown Victoria, the Devil’s Mountain fault that connects the Leech River fault to the mainland, and the Strawberry Point and Utsalady Point faults that meet under Whidbey Island, they’re all capable of causing a magnitude 7.5 quake, which would bring down a building like hers in a matter of minutes. There’s a one-in-three chance one of them will do so before she’s sixty. At night, she sits on her sofa and looks out at the high-rises facing her across False Creek, the highest population density in North America, and thinks of Gilean Douglas’s cabin, built so low to the ground it can’t even be seen from the shore.
Two hours before the meeting, she takes a taxi to the corner of Cordova and Dunlevy. She could have run it but she doesn’t want to go to the meeting with Tom wearing Lycra. She walks half a block south on Dunlevy and enters a storefront attached to the Missionaries of Charity Centre, across from Oppenheimer Park. The Needle House, it’s called, and she’s relieved to see Sister Darlene still running it. Darling Darlene. She’s behind the counter with a social worker, handing out childproof safe-injection kits and Narcan inhalers. A dozen people are sitting on the easy chairs scattered about the room, no feng shui here, either, some of them asleep, some rubbing their arms, two or three checking their cell phones. No one looks at her. Behind the counter, Sister Darlene appears smaller and older than Daphne remembers her, her eyes darker, her skin sagging over her cheeks and under her jaw. Her arms dangle like bell clappers from the sleeves of her Needle House T-shirt, so thin Daphne wonders that she can pick up a kit with one hand. When she sees Daphne, she comes out from behind the counter, not smiling, and hits her on the shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“It’s okay. I just came to say hi.” She smiles. “I didn’t think you’d remember me.”
Sister Darlene reaches up and grabs Daphne’s shoulders and rests her forehead against Daphne’s chin. “I thought…”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Still in the program.”
“Come on in the back, I’ll make us some tea.” She takes Daphne past a row of privacy booths, through a metal door, and along a hall to the office, and from there into a small staff room with a grey metal table and chairs, a half-fridge, and a sink. She fills a kettle at the sink and plugs it in.
“You’re looking good,” she says, turning to Daphne. “I shouldn’t have worried.”
“It’s good to see you again, Darlene. How’s the House doing?”
Sister Darlene shrugs. “Uphill battle. It’s not about dirty needles anymore, it’s about fentanyl. We lost three more this week. Dealers are bragging about how many users their junk has killed. It’s in everything. You were lucky you got out when you did.”
“I know. I’m helping some people make a documentary about it. Can I give them your number?”
“Sure, why not. A little more publicity can’t hurt. How’s your dad?”
“He died two years ago.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay. Starting to feel things again.”
“Ha! Death can do that, can’t it? Good for you!”
“I miss my dad. I didn’t think I would.”
“He was a good guy.”
“I know.”
“He saved your life, Daphne.”
“I know.”
“He pulled you out of that dumpster.”
“I know.”
“Nobody would have found you in there.”
“I don’t know how he did.”
“He followed you. He got you out. He got you here. And then he took you back to Toronto and got you off the junk.”
Daphne smiles. “He kidnapped me.”
“It’s not kidnapping when it’s your own kid.”
“I guess.”
“What are you doing now?”
She shrugs. “Working with these film people. Living quietly. I run a lot, it seems to keep me settled.”
“Stop in anytime, Daphne. I’m always here, for my sins.”
“I will. And I’ll give the director your number. His name is Tom Blair. He’s a good guy, too. I’ll come down with him.”
She leaves through a side door that exits into the alley that runs off Dunlevy. She hasn’t been here in eight years, but nothing seems to have changed. She walks down the alley until she comes to a tree growing beside a dumpster, and stops for a few moments. There are scratch marks, like starling or squirrel tracks, on the dumpster’s edge. She peers inside, notes the broken cardboard boxes, the torn clothing, a mangy stuffed animal. She continues walking, making a few notes and taking photos with her phone as she zigzags up to East Hastings and turns towards downtown. She doesn’t see anyone she knows. When she reaches Carrall Street and sees the statue of Gassy Jack, she feels the tension leave her shoulders, and by the time she reaches the Hotel Vancouver she is breathing almost normally again.
* * *
—
Tom is sitting in the lobby bar with a glass of wine. He’s wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a tailored sports jacket over a light-blue shirt. His hair is brushed and his cell phone isn’t lying on the table beside his drink. She’s wearing a simple skirt and a long-sleeved sweater that buttons to her neck. She sits beside him, orders a Perrier and lime from the waiter, who is young and smiles politely, and tries not to think about the fourteen floors of stone blocks precariously stacked above their heads. The University of Victoria seismologist she interviewed told her that old buildings like this will be the first to go, and she almost called Tom to ask for a change of venue. She thought maybe the Sandbar on Granville Island, then remembered the seismologist also said that a magnitude 9.0 earthquake would create a forty-foot tsunami that would wipe out the entire city up to West Sixteenth. She tells this to Tom and he laughs.
“You like to get caught up in your work, don’t you?” he says.
“I don’t like to,” she says. “It’s more like it gets caught up in me.”
“That’s a good thing, no?”
“Sometimes.”
She has often wondered why Tom didn’t hit on her when they were on Cortes. She sort of half expected and half dreaded that he would, and still hasn’t figured out what her response would have been. Something about keeping her personal life separate from her professional life, but that wouldn’t have been very convincing, would it, because, as he just pointed out, she doesn’t really have a personal life separate from her work life. Maybe he’s in a relationship. Maybe he’s gay. She tells him about Sister Darlene and says she’ll give him a list of a few other locations she knows about.
“Great,” he says. “I knew you were the right person for this.”
The waiter brings her mineral water.
“We’ve decided to go ahead with the Cortes location,” Tom says. “I finally convinced Snakejack that the extra cost of getting our stuff in there would be more than offset by not having to build an entire set from scratch. It’s already right there. And the locals seem friendly.”
Do they? She tries to see Reg buying bok choy at the farmers’ market from whoever they get to play the daughter. Maybe.
“That’s great, Tom. Will you be going up there again?”
“I’ll let you know. Would you go up with me?”
“Yes.”
“Did I tell you? I’m going to call the film Once More the Storm.”
