The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  Then, as Anne looked out the window, Helen disappeared behind the car, too.

  Helen gathered the plastic bag inside out over her hand and bent over slowly. It wasn’t easy, and she felt, as she often did, as though she might just lose her balance and topple forward face-first into the pavement. She had never liked this part, the soft feel of it, the too-familiar warmth through the thin plastic against her hand. Roxy had already moved away to the grass verge, muzzle deep in the new grass, pulling at it with her teeth.

  “Don’t go making yourself sick now,” Helen said. “I don’t want to be picking that up, too.”

  Helen held the bag and looked around carefully. Then she folded the top of the bag open, just a little, and, reaching out, rubbed the soiled plastic in under the cup-shaped door handle on the driver’s side of the Warners’ car.

  It was important not to leave too much, she thought. Just a thin streak, out of sight. Just enough, without leaving any obvious, definite sign. Dirt on their hands, with no idea where it came from. Helen looked at Roxy and Roxy looked back — inscrutable, aware, and, Helen thought, somehow disappointed.

  “Time to go home, Roxy,” she said. “Time to go home.”

  Farewell Tour

  Sam wasn’t sure he was in exactly the right place on the beach: it was the right beach, he knew that. He was absolutely certain of that. But it was daylight now, and when they’d been there together, it had been dark. Now, with the families and children, bathing suits and sand buckets, it looked a lot different.

  They had been there late at night and the beach had been empty, not even the teenaged bonfire revellers left, so that the thin slight slap of the small waves coming in white on the shore was the only constant sound. A small crest of foam at the front of each wave caught whatever light there was and reflected it back, a thin repeating line on the edge between the dark sand and the dark sky. They’d been walking hand in hand, the sand giving way slowly under their feet with small attempts at resistance, and then she let go of his hand and seemed to disappear into the darkness ahead of him. Except she didn’t vanish. Beth stepped sideways and stopped directly in front of him, just three steps ahead, something, he realized later, that she must have planned the whole time. He walked right into her and, startled in the dark, his hands sought purchase on what he’d collided with. She’d caught his wrists quickly and pressed his hands in tightly on her hips, arching her neck backwards so she could reach his ear and whisper.

  “Just put it in me right here.”

  She bent forward and held onto her ankles, her dress shucked up over her ass. He did what he was told, smiling foolishly out into the darkness, feeling everything, his pants loose and open, feeling things as disparate as the belt buckle and the top button on his jeans slapping loosely against his skin, keeping time. Wondering the whole time if at any moment a spotlight or a headlight would flash over them from the now-distant parking lot — knowing that the fear was groundless and yet still enthralling.

  It was over quickly, and Beth almost matter-of-factly took her panties out of her jacket pocket and stepped into them: he was slightly ahead of her, and watched her silhouetted against the single street light far down the beach at the parking lot. He had no idea when she had taken them off, and, distracted, he tried to figure out what he’d been doing so that he hadn’t noticed.

  With a start, Sam realized how completely he had sunk into the memory, standing stock-still in the sand — it was like night had been instantly replaced by day. The sun was beating down, the beach was crowded with fifty or sixty people, the wave-swept sand almost completely marked up with criss-crossing footprints. And Beth? Probably surprising someone else now, he thought.

  It had all ended in a rush — Sam couldn’t even figure out what the cause was, in fact, if there even was anything as distinct as a cause. There was no building to an angry crescendo — just a gradual winding-down, like a clock losing the energy to flick its second hand even one more space.

  “We just seem to have, I don’t know, settled down,” she’d said. “And I don’t like settling.”

  Three days later, virtually every trace of her was gone from their apartment, like she’d spent a couple of weeks taking inventory and splitting things up. He half expected to pick up something as simple as a mug, turn it over, and find a square of masking tape with “Sam’s” written on it in her handwriting. What she had done was more than just leaving: it was like a surgical strike, well planned and carefully executed.

  She had erased herself, he thought, from absolutely everything but his memory. Not long after she left, he wished she had stripped herself out of there as well.

  Sam was never ready when some memory of her returned. He’d decide to make potato salad, and be shaken by an unexpected image of Beth at the counter, cutting cooked potatoes into cubes. The way her smile gathered at the corners of her mouth, the rise and fall, shoulder to hip, when she was facing away from him in bed and tented lightly under a single sheet. He’d remembered holding her when they were picking blueberries, both of them sweaty, while she insisted she was able to suck the blue stain from his fingers, and he twisted with desire from the feeling of her tongue against his fingertips. Familiar places were like a minefield, but the nighttime was worse. Sam lost count of the times he dreamt about finding Beth in the places they’d gone on vacation: the cottage in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, the Prince Edward Island old-style resort with the long beach directly across the road, the Mexican town where they had a small separate suite with a balcony looking out and down over an ancient-looking market.

  He’d explained it to his friends at work, who seemed to be decidedly sick of the whole topic of Beth and her sudden departure.

  “It’s like I have to undo the things we did,” he told them. “I’ve got enough saved up to go to every single place we ever went together, and enough vacation time on the books to do it all at the one time.” He told Mitch and Kevin, both rushing through their coffees, that he thought the best thing to do was to overwrite all the memories of being a couple with new experiences, so that if he had to travel in his sleep, he could at least travel by himself.

  “She’s sewn right into me in all of those places,” he said. “I’m going to take the stitches out.”

  Mitch told him that he thought the idea was stupid. Kevin was a little more gracious: “You’ve got to do something,” he said, but it sounded a little more grudging than Sam would have liked.

  Sam went to Mexico first, and right away, while still on the plane, he wondered if both his friends hadn’t been right: he had to do something, but perhaps the trip was a stupid idea. He hadn’t gotten much further than the idea that he would go to each place. Perhaps, he thought, he should have spent more time planning what he would do when he actually got there. He’d successfully booked the same suite in the small Mexican town they’d visited, but he hadn’t expected what it would be like on the first morning there. Exhausted from the trip, he’d fallen into a turbulent and fractured sleep, his first waking thought while standing by the mirror that Beth’s hairbrush was missing from the spot where it should have been, where it had been, two full years before.

  He made coffee and drank it all, the whole pot, sitting at the same wrought-iron table he’d sat at all those months earlier, his cup rocking every time he set it down on the floral pattern twisted into the metal. It was a familiar teeter — he knew the cup couldn’t topple, but he kept reaching for it after he set it down, his hand coming forward every time the cup wobbled.

  When he visited the market in town, it only reminded him about how concerned he’d been when Beth had found a stall selling freshly squeezed orange juice and bought a plastic glass full.

  “Aren’t you worried about getting sick?” he’d asked. “Montezuma’s revenge and all that?”

  “Aren’t you going to lighten up and live a little?” she had laughed back at him. It seemed like banter then — in retrospect, he thought, more like judgment.

  He counted familiar thi
ngs off on his fingers as he passed them: the pastry shop where they’d bought water and a handful of almond-flavoured cookies for breakfast; a restaurant where they’d skipped having a meal and settled on repeated vodka and sodas for her and dark beers for him; a huge open-air place with a handful of mid-afternoon customers where she’d suggested they should head for the bathroom together — “It’ll be worth your while” — but had settled on reaching under the table and putting her hand high up on his thigh, tucked beneath the edge of his shorts, looking at him mischievously and giving his leg a squeeze. Behind her, he caught a table of three men snatching looks at her, in between a loose discussion about the costs and benefits of surface mining. There was the store where she’d bought an incredibly form-fitting long jersey dress, cream-coloured, in which she spontaneously developed a habit of regularly pushing her hands down her sides, pulling the cloth tantalizingly close to her skin every time. He hadn’t told her she was doing it, but he found himself almost waiting for her palms to begin their downward and figure-defining travel.

  This is not working at all, he thought later that night, lying in the same bed they’d shared, looking at the same gently spinning ceiling fan.

  He fell asleep with the lights on and woke up in the middle of the night confused, displaced, and shaking from the memory of her laughter ringing through the room. Her laughter, he thought. Throaty. Full of trouble. And now, surrounding him.

  I have three more days booked before flying to Nova Scotia, he thought the next morning, looking down glumly at the same green chili breakfast enchilada that Beth had ordered almost every day they’d been there.

  On the second night, a Friday, he resolutely tried to spend his way through a fistful of hundred-peso notes at a dark but busy side-street bar, a place he and Beth had passed every single day walking through the town, gripping his beer tightly and telling himself that he was having fun. Halfway through the evening, a woman sat down next to him and smiled, and Sam liked that, until they struggled through the language barrier and both established that she expected to be paid. He had smiled ruefully, offered a flat “No, gracias,” and almost changed his mind as he watched her walk away.

  He threw up on the uneven cobblestones on his way back to the hotel, beer and foam cutting in angled runnels between the stones. He had to lean on the wall after he rang the bell and waited, embarrassed, for the security guard to open the metal gate and let him in.

  Sam spent the entire next day in the room, the curtains drawn, trying to keep his eyes closed, the “Do not disturb” sign on his door not only because he was hungover, but because he simply didn’t want to look out and see the town anymore.

  On what was supposed to be his last day in the town, he checked out early and hired a car to take him back to Mexico City, where he stayed the night in a featureless hotel near the airport that held the singular benefit that he and Beth had never been near the place.

  Nova Scotia was a different kind of pain. He had forgotten that their trip to the Annapolis Valley had been one of their very first together. When he had planned his return trip, he’d carefully booked the same cabin, only to realize when he pulled up in the rental car that he had conveniently forgotten that the place was almost without any sort of distraction, that their main experience of the place was mostly under the covers and inside the walls, which were themselves remarkably stark.

  The cabin was near the Gaspereau River, settled into the side of a hill with regimented rows of apple trees in front of it. Inside, Sam saw — and remembered — the picture of a farmer boy in overalls standing next to two aproned girls on the living room wall, a pullout couch that must have been bought cheap, because its crushed green velvet and floral pattern was too garish for anyone to buy for their home. There were four galley chairs around a small dining table covered with a plastic tablecloth decorated with pictures of grapes, strawberries, and pears, a design that absorbed any possible surface stain as just another piece of its complicated pattern.

  The cabin was so plain, he thought, so empty of personality that Beth’s absence was as obvious as if he’d gone into the tiny bathroom and noticed in the bathroom mirror that one of his front teeth was suddenly missing. He had never been anywhere, he realized, where her presence had been so totally part of the room.

  There were two other cottages in the row — both empty — and an absolutely traditional white farmhouse where the owners lived. They told him to make himself at home — that they were heading to Halifax to hit the shopping centres and bulk stores for supplies for the upcoming tourist season.

  “You’re our first guest this year,” the woman said. “I’m sorry we’re not better prepared. We don’t usually see anyone this early.”

  She gave him three days’ worth of towels, all smelling strongly of fabric softener, four hand soaps, and two extra rolls of toilet paper before they left. Sam had a feeling that she recognized him, and guessed why he was alone. And that she felt sorry for him.

  He realized later that night that the owners had turned off every light in the house before they left, so Sam’s cabin was a barren little pool of empty light all by itself in a mostly darkened valley, with only the stars and a line of street lights along a distant ridge to break the almost-absolute darkness. When he went outside, there were so many stars in the sky that it seemed almost oppressive, as if the sky was actually bulging down toward him, pressing all those stars closer. Like he was being forced to eat.

  Beth, it seemed to Sam, would be impossible to avoid.

  But he tried anyway.

  He found his way back out past Port Williams — to the great long fine-sand-and-mud beaches drained by the Bay of Fundy’s tides — and promptly remembered that Beth had lost her watch on the same beach when she had left it safely on a rock well above the water’s edge. The tide raced in over the flats faster than they had imagined, even though the strength and speed of the tides was almost always part of any tourism advertisement.

  He’d been upset: Beth had laughed. “It’s my own fault,” she’d said, as if that meant she wasn’t allowed to be upset about it. He drove the same back roads, stopped and had chowder at the same place that had disappointed him before, the chowder milky and thin, the clams scarce.

  He went into Wolfville and walked the sea dykes and the barely used railway tracks. Drove to the same beach where the wind had turned cold, but where they’d lain on their stomachs and searched the beach gravel for rose quartz and agates. Stretched out with their feet at opposite compass points, they were face to face, picking through the same small field of stones, and all he had to do was look up to watch her searching the beach in front of her. The expression on her face was one that she had when she was truly concentrating. The way Sam remembered it, she caught him looking at her a couple of times, and smiled quickly before looking back at the beach stones.

  Coming back down the valley toward the cabin, Sam also stopped just below a hydroelectric plant, where the river turned in a dark and slow circle, the powerful current bulging up occasionally to the surface like loosely molded jelly, before the water turned downstream toward the sea.

  They hadn’t been there together, but Sam remembered catching sight of the dark water as they passed in the car from somewhere else. He would have liked to stop then, but it was something that he had thought she might not have enjoyed — when she had been in the car with him, he’d simply kept driving.

  Sitting next to the water — looking across at the “No Swimming” signs complete with skull and crossbones — was better than rattling around inside the walls of the cabin, he thought.

  Sam was strangely hopeful when he handed back the cabin keys and started the drive to Prince Edward Island. He wasn’t sure if it was because the cure was working, or simply because the trip was almost over. The car had satellite radio, a station that played songs he hadn’t heard before, but that seemed to be the kind of music he could quickly like. Maybe the thing is to focus on the differences, he thought: look sharply at them, and then let your e
yes drift.

  But Sam hadn’t been prepared for the beach.

  One moment he was walking in the sand, feeling the heat of the sun battering against his skin while it reflected off the surface of the water, the noise of children and families and passing boats full in his ears. The next, it was silent, except for the quiet lop of the small waves falling over themselves on the sandy shore, and it was dark, and he could sense her out there in front of him, feel the warmth and shape of her, the kind of sixth sense that sometimes makes you slow down for no reason before you actually meet an obstacle. Sam hit the solid, soft wall of Beth’s memory hard, even as he realized she wasn’t there at all.

  He was amazed to find himself back in the front seat of his rental car, unable to remember staggering his way back across the soft beach sand, not knowing if he had pushed through sandcastles or across moats and over beach blankets, wondering if he had left a wake of startled children and angry parents behind him.

  He was able to get himself together enough to start the car and head back to the hotel, making the shallow curves on the road almost by rote, his mind elsewhere.

  The resort had been a rail baron’s island getaway — broken up now into suites, bathrooms added wherever necessary and possible — but it was still very much an old estate, tightly packed with wooden features and stuffed animal heads, every downstairs room remarkably suited to deep chairs and the slow ticking of clocks. It even had a billiards room, although the whole time he was there, no one played.

  The resort was also renowned for its dinner service. Beth had read that word to him when she’d booked the place, “re-now-n-ed,” like it had four formal and full syllables. Maybe too renowned.

  “You’re in the first sitting? We’re overbooked.”

  The woman at the front desk wasn’t apologetic in the least. A small, sharp-looking woman in a dark jacket, she said the words as if she was throwing them straight at him, almost daring him to react.