Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

by Theodora Armstrong

  “Has it been that long?” I sip at the fluorescent cooler and then hold up the bottle to squint at the label: Limelicious Hard Punch. “I think this stuff is giving me a headache.”

  “Oh, just drink it,” Carin says, flexing her toes and adjusting her bikini. “You’re so picky.” She’s gained weight since I last saw her, the bathing suit bottom digging into the extra flesh around her waist. Pudge, Carin says. Something to hang onto.

  “And the hubby?” She sends a kick of cold water at me and I splash her back, but her mattress is so large the water barely reaches her. “Anton’s fine,” I say. “He just started his residency at St. Paul’s, so he’s pretty busy.”

  “I always knew you’d end up with someone like that,” Carin says, sitting up to dangle her legs in the water.

  “Like what?”

  “Lawyer, doctor, that type.”

  As we pass under the first bridge, I sink further into the donut hole, my legs sticking up in the air, icy water over my midriff. The channel widens and deepens so that we’re barely moving and we float along lazily. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange?” Carin asks, slipping off her mat into the channel. “You dropping in like this.”

  “Is it?”

  “This is not exactly how I pictured my day going,” Carin treads water in front of me.

  “I can’t visit my sister? See how things are coming along.”

  “Coming along?” Carin raises her eyebrows and then disappears under the water. I brace myself, expecting to have my tube flipped, but instead she swims away from me, back toward the bridge, against the current. When she finally surfaces she’s several metres away. “How’s the planning going?” she shouts and starts a dog-paddle in my direction.

  “Fine,” I shrug.

  “A wedding seems like so much work.” Carin has reached my tube and is hanging off the side, breathing heavily. “You should just elope. I’ve never been to Mexico.”

  “I have a wedding planner to help.” I close my eyes and try to relax my jaw muscles. Sue Clarkson, wedding planner, with her curlicue handwriting. She is in the habit of couriering samples, which could easily be sent by email, to the insurance office, stamping URGENT across the manila envelope. Sue has two stamps, the other being IMPORTANT. At some point, I began filing the envelopes, unopened, along with all the other mail. Pictures of towering fondant cakes and bouquets accented with sprigs of baby’s breath; sparkling cocktail recipes. The guest list is several pages long. Anton has invited his entire extended family of sixty-three people; I have Carin. “The girls at the office threw me a shower last week,” I say.

  “No one told me.” Carin pushes away to climb back onto her mattress.

  “You would have hated it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There were balloon penises.”

  Clouds appear behind the hills, a breeze picking them up and stretching them across the sky. Carin opens another bottle. Her empty rolls off the air mattress and drops into the channel. I fish it out and plunk it into the half-empty pack. “Slow down,” I say.

  “You have a maid of honour?” Carin asks, dipping her head back into the water as though she doesn’t really care what my answer is. I wait until she surfaces before answering no. I was hoping Carin wouldn’t ask, but I knew she would. I know so many other women, responsible women, punctual women, women who wash their hair more than twice a week. There are certain expectations. Carin doesn’t say anything. She smirks and looks down the length of the channel. Her expression reminds me of her younger self, the one who would stick out her chin stubbornly or kick you in the shins if she felt she wasn’t getting fair treatment. “Am I gonna get to meet him one day,” she says, after some time.

  “Anton?” The tube has spun around so I’m looking at Carin’s feet. She is lying on her stomach now with her legs splayed open.

  “Don’t I need to give my approval?”

  “You’ll meet him at the wedding.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  We float in silence past a dinghy full of kids. One of them must have lost something, because they’re all quiet, staring intently at the water.

  “I guess I should be helping,” Carin says.

  “With what?” I can’t stop a laugh.

  “I don’t know, pluck petals off roses or something,” she says, finishing her cooler. “Do you need a flower girl?”

  I laugh a little harder and Carin joins in.

  “Just show up.”

  “We’re getting to the gross part,” Carin says and I lift my feet out of the water as we pass the underwater pipe. Thin, feathery weeds choke up the channel. Carin shivers, still haunted by her childhood phobia of waterweeds. I catch one on my toe and kick it at her. We laugh some more and when I float by her, I grab her hand and rest my heels on her air mattress. It does feel good to be with her again. When we’re apart I always forget I miss her. And then when I’m with her I’m suddenly hit with these horrible pangs of yearning for her company, even though at that moment she is right there in front of me. Usually I have to leave soon after that because something she’s said makes me want to strangle her. She’s always known how to push my buttons.

  Carin lifts one of my heels. “You have claws.”

  With my feet on display, I suddenly realize they have gone untouched for months, calloused and rough, the toenails curling over fleshy tips. How can someone forget their own feet? I am careful, always, with hygiene; I use grooming to assess a person’s competency. Carin, with the armpits, tends to rate very low on that scale. Instinctively, I dip my toes back into the water and then feel stupid for being so obviously self-conscious. “Aren’t we getting off soon?” I say, quickly finishing the rest of my cooler.

  Up ahead I can see the end point, the concrete stairs leading out of the water and the big blue-and-red school bus waiting to take all the drifters back to the town. Above the gas station a large banner reads Relvis and Hot Dogs and a man in a white sequined Elvis outfit sings “In the Ghetto” on a makeshift platform in the parking lot. Carin hops out of the water and pulls her air mattress up the concrete stairs and over to the gravel driveway. I hoist the inner tube onto my shoulder and while we wait in line to get on the bus we push the air out of the mattress. Carin is distracted by a large group of raucous men standing in front of us, drinking beer. They board the bus and pay their fare and we follow them on. I hand the bus driver our money, but he waves it away and with a gesture toward the drunk men, says, “They took care of you.” I roll my eyes, but Carin struts over to thank them, grinning widely.

  The only seats left surround the group of drunkards. I take one in front of them and focus out the window as the bus pulls away. I suddenly feel completely out of place in my hometown, out of place on this bus next to my own sister. Everything feels wrong; my bare feet on the dirty floor, my head nearly touching the ceiling, the friction of my wet bathing suit on the vinyl seat. I miss the cool white walls of my eleventh-story condo. Watching Carin I see everything I’m not. She’s already made a friend, chatting up one of the better-looking guys in the group. He opens a beer and hands it to her and she slides in beside him. She tells a loud dirty joke and the back of the bus erupts in laughter, but when she looks over at me I find it hard to even smile.

  CARIN AND I NEARLY died on the channel one year and to this day she still refuses to take responsibility. We used to float down weekly, Mom piling us into the pickup with our inner tubes tied down in the truck’s bed. It was a great way for her to get rid of us for a couple of hours, dumping us into the channel at the Okanagan end and picking us up later in the parking lot across from Skaha.

  One afternoon, standing side by side on the banks, Carin wanted to tie our two inner tubes together with rope so we wouldn’t float apart. The channel was high and fast that year, water licking at the edges, pulling along rocks and clumps of grass, and Carin was scared. With my legs braced aga
inst the icy water and my inner tube bouncing around my waist in anticipation, I shouted at Carin to hurry up and get in. She was going through a phase where she never wanted to be more than arm’s reach from me. “She’ll grow out of it,” my mother kept repeating. “One day she won’t want to have anything to do with you.” When I started to lose feeling in my toes from the freezing water, I finally agreed to let Carin tie the tubes together, but I made her promise not to talk to me if she was going to be clinging for the entire ride.

  The first bridge the channel passes under is bisected by a large concrete support wall, and even from a distance I could see the water breaking around the pillar, creating a foaming mouth that wrapped around either side of the cement wall. When we reached the bridge Carin went on one side and I went on the other, the rope holding in the middle, balancing our equal weights. I clung to the wet rubber tube, afraid to let go and be sucked underwater by the strong current, my legs battering helplessly against the concrete as water poured over my head. Part of the rope wrapped around my calf and I kicked wildly to stay afloat, fumbling with the twine that linked our tubes, but the knot was on Carin’s side. I screamed at her. “Carin, untie us! Carin, you dingbat!” It was hard to hear her over the roar of the water, but she kept calling my name and I could hear her sobbing. Every time I screamed at her, I swallowed a mouthful of water. “It’s your fault! Carin! Your fault!”

  The man came from my side of the channel. I hadn’t noticed him sitting there in the dark angle of the bridge, watching me hang on for dear life. He was standing up the bank a ways, making swimming motions with his arms, but I ignored him. His scraggly hair reached down past his shoulders and he wore dirty jeans and an unbuttoned shirt that displayed a hairy, tattooed chest. He fit the description of men our mother warned us not to trust. I watched him walk up the bank a bit further, take off his shirt and his crummy boots, and wade into the water. He fought the current out to the middle of the channel and then floated placidly toward us like some sort of grizzled river nymph. He straddled the concrete wall and pulled a knife out of nowhere as the water swelled around him. With one quick flick of the blade he slit the rope and set us both free. I floated away so serenely that for a moment the whole thing seemed like a dream, but when Carin’s inner tube drifted toward me without her, my heart stopped. Still on my tube, I tried to paddle upstream to find her, but the current was too strong. Finally I spotted her coming out from under the bridge, flailing through the water. I kicked downstream where it was shallower to catch her tube, and then stood to watch her thrash messily until she was practically under my nose. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying. “You can touch, dummy.” Those were the only words I said to her for the rest of the ride. The incident was another point of proof toward everything I already knew — that Carin was my responsibility, that I would always be watching out for her and she would be hanging on tight, like that rope around my ankle.

  THE BUS DEPOSITS US right in front of the Sunnyside trailer park and we pad barefoot across the hot asphalt into the cool shade of the willows that line the road. Carin has a lot near the channel, close enough that the ducks wander over for bread crusts and if you look hard you can get a glimpse of the water sparkling between the trees. “Want a tour?” Carin says, hopping up the little steps to the trailer.

  “I’ve been in there before.” I drop into one of her lawn chairs.

  “I’ve upgraded,” Carin says, disappearing inside.

  “Where’s Mom’s truck?” The hitch trailer is noticeably missing our Mom’s white Dodge. We made the long drive to the coast every summer in that truck to go to the PNE fair. Weeks before we left, it was all I could talk about — the rides I was going to go on, the carnival games I was going to win. As we followed the highway through the mountains, I would get lighter and lighter until I was bouncing around the cab.

  “I sold it,” Carin says, from a little window above my head. She was always stunned by the entire trip to Vancouver. She played along, but I don’t think she ever liked going to the city. I had to drag her onto all the rides at the fair. She missed the ducks. She missed the lake.

  “Never used the truck anyway,” Carin says, coming back down the little trailer stairs with two bottles of beer.

  “I would’ve bought it from you.”

  “What do you need a truck for in the city?”

  “That’s not the point.” All the coolness from the channel ride has left my body and I feel overheated and annoyed.

  “Would’ve been a bitch to park downtown,” Carin says, taking a drink from her beer.

  “Doesn’t it seem pointless to have a hitch you can’t actually hitch to anything?”

  “Where would I go, anyway?”

  “I don’t feel like beer,” I say, heading into the trailer to find something else to drink. The living area with the kitchen and fold-down dining table are the same, except for the new flatscreen in the corner. There are clothes scattered across the black leather couch and breakfast dishes on the table. I open the fridge — it’s mostly empty and smells of sour milk. To get to the bed, Carin has to climb past the breakfast benches. There’s a little tan-coloured curtain for privacy.

  “I would’ve cleaned up if I knew you were coming,” Carin says when I come back down the steps with a glass of water.

  “You don’t have a phone,” I sigh.

  Two ducks waddle onto the lot expectantly. I reach out to the one closest and it snaps at my finger.

  “Yeah, he’s a nasty one,” Carin says. She goes back into the trailer and comes out with a bag of bread, pulling out a slice and throwing the entire thing at the duck’s head. He snatches it and drags it behind a tree, flapping at the other ducks approaching him. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “Do you have power?” I ask, pulling my phone and charger from my bag.

  “Of course. Didn’t you see my TV?”

  “So you can afford cable, but no phone.” I unload a tent from the back of the car and begin arranging the poles by size on the gravel.

  “The phone is more of a lifestyle choice.”

  “Hm.”

  “You want some help with that?” I take one look at Carin lounging in her chair with the half-finished beer and know she’ll get in the way more than she’ll help. “You can sleep in the bed with me if you want,” she says.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “I can make room inside. It’ll get hot out here in the morning. Sun beats down.” Carin grins and watches me struggle with the tent poles.

  “I’d rather sleep outside,” I say pointedly.

  “I’ll leave the door unlocked so you can use the washroom.”

  After staring at the inside of the refrigerator, Carin orders pizza for dinner. We eat at her dinette, the pizza box covering the entire table. Later I sit in one of the lawn chairs outside. Carin’s watching TV inside and it’s quiet, but for the occasional bug frying in the massive zapper she has hung from a tree beside the trailer. The contraption looks large enough to kill a small bird. A moth flutters around its fluorescent green light and gets nuked by an electrical current that lights up the patio. I stare for a while at the phone cradled in my lap and then call Anton. His voice is tired. “Were you sleeping? I guess it’s kind of late.” I say, checking my watch.

  “I just finished my shift. How’s your sister?”

  “Fine, same old.”

  “She recovered quickly from her flu.” Something in his voice tells me he knows I lied.

  “I guess. Her place is a mess,” I say. “She sold Mom’s truck. I wish she’d get her life together.”

  “People do things at their own pace.”

  “She’s twenty-eight, Anton. She’s going to be a waitress for life.” Another electric current lights up the patio.

  “Maybe she likes waitressing.”

  “Come on.” I slump back in the lawn chair and look out at the sky. I suddenly
miss the feeling of Anton’s arms draped over me. “Why am I here?”

  “Beats me. You probably needed to know she’s okay.”

  “Who actually likes waitressing?”

  “Maybe Carin does.”

  IN THE MORNING I wake up disoriented, the air in the tent solid with heat. Sometime during the night I got turned around and I claw at the vinyl sides, kneeling on my glasses in the process as I blindly try to find the opening. The zipper comes into focus. With what feels like a gasp from both myself and the tent, I tumble out onto the gravel. Carin stands a few feet away with the ducks, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “I was wondering when you’d wake up.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “What?” Across the street I can hear people unloading from the channel bus. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “You were snoring.”

  “So?”

  “So, you sounded tired.”

  I climb into the trailer, looking for something to drink, and end up with my head under the kitchen tap. “I think I’ll sleep inside tonight,” I call out the window.

  The rest of the morning I lounge in the shade of the trailer, reading magazines and clipping my toenails. I look for nail polish in Carin’s bathroom, but can only find an old tube of mashed lipstick and tanning oil. There’s still no food in the fridge (I ate stale Ritz crackers for breakfast) and Carin’s back in her bikini, sunbathing on a lounger, a huge glass of lemonade sweating in her hand.

  “I’m going for a run,” I say, lacing up my sneakers.

  “You’re on holiday,” she says, swatting the air. “Relax.”

  “That is what I do to relax.” I stand to stretch my legs, leaning up against the trailer to flex my calf muscles. “I run every day.”

  “Where?”

  “What do you mean, where? Around.” I pull my arms across my chest. “Don’t you have work today?”

  “No.” She licks at some condensation running down the side of her glass. “It’s a part-time gig, for right now.”