by Lisa Moore
Even though Joanne had informed the girl that she couldn’t help her under the present circumstances, the girl would call up anyway and talk for hours about how afraid she was of the baby coming out. She said she had no idea how that could happen. She said she didn’t believe it. Where your pee comes out?
When Joanne would try to get off the phone the girl who was not a client, and on whom there was no paperwork, and who wouldn’t even give Joanne her name, and who may or may not have left a foster home and wasn’t going back there no matter what, the girl would pretend to go into labour. She’d tell Joanne she thought the baby was coming and could she, Joanne, just stay on the phone for, say, another twenty minutes, until the pains went away?
Once, when Joanne told the girl she really had to hang up, the girl had said, I’ve seen you with your dog. You got a white dog with black spots, don’t you?
Joanne had a mutt named Twist, rescued from the SPCA, whom she walked every morning up in the churchyard behind the dance school after she got off work at the shelter.
I seen you with the dog, the girl said. Up by the church there in the morning after work. Sometimes you bring your coffee. I seen you there.
Joanne let the dog go in the field behind the churchyard at six a.m. every workday, after she arrived home, and before she went to bed for the morning until mid-afternoon. There was never anybody around, not even traffic, at that hour.
The leaves were already out in the field behind the dance school, and in places the foliage and weeds were very high and overgrown. The sun came through greenish and smelling green. Joanne’s jeans would get soaked with dew up to the knees.
Sometimes she brought her coffee with her, and the dog would make it splash all over the cuff of her jean jacket until they got to the churchyard and she let him off the leash.
Joanne didn’t see how the girl could know about these moments when it was just beginning to get light, everybody asleep and just the rustle of the dog in the alders.
She felt around in the leaves of misted cilantro for her phone and realized she’d been fired on the girl’s due date. The smell of wet cilantro remained on her fingers all day.
* * *
If Elizabeth O’Brien had to rely on something about herself, this was the thing she could definitely tick the box for: composure.
People loved to see Elizabeth coming. At a party or in the field, she was full of puns and innocent flirtation, a jollier of introverts, a beautiful woman, glowing from hours spent in the wild. If someone offended her, by no means an easy thing to do, she became serene. Sometimes as it sank in, the offence, she even smiled involuntarily. Her teeth were very white, but naturally so. She hadn’t had them whitened. She might have to lower her sunglasses from her hair, if the offence had been particularly disturbing. But she always managed to maintain a placid composure.
Environment had been hit hard, Education, Health; Justice had been hit. Justice fought back, but nobody wanted to hear about Environment.
She had lost her job managing the biggest colony of Leach’s storm petrels in the world. At night, lying awake in bed, she sometimes imagined she could smell the bird colony’s pungent odour. The birds nested underground, and the odour, carried on the sea breeze, could be as sharp as sheep shit, a mingling of sun-warmed peat, or orange spruce needles, or semen, berries, rotten fish, ammonia.
By “managing,” what she meant was, she went out to an island three kilometres from shore, to stay for a week to ten days with a couple of biology students, and they tagged the birds and collected data.
Once, the helicopter that had delivered them had been lifting off, and Elizabeth had discovered that the feds had boarded up the well, the only source of drinking water on the island. She waved her arms into the caterwauling stir of wind and roar, and the helicopter touched back down, one ski pirouetting in the racing grass. She ran, bent over, under the blades and screamed to the pilot did he have a square-head screwdriver, and he tossed it to her before the helicopter floated up and away.
The first thing was, she lost her composure. But she experienced that in private. The loss of her job was a judgement, and she was surprised by how personal it felt. Elizabeth got a short-term contract almost immediately with a Japanese film crew who wanted an eagle’s nest they could shoot from above. She could have shown them any number of eagles’ nests from the water, but they wanted to look down. She had heard there was a nest somewhere between the marine lab in Logy Bay and the Robin Hood dump. She went with Joanne Brophy, her sister-in-law, and they walked for an hour and a half, and Elizabeth stopped and said, Did you hear that? Did you hear something that sounded like a drop of water falling on a stone?
Joanne said she had heard it. But it wasn’t raining.
That’s a raven, Elizabeth said. They can imitate any sound. That’s a raven imitating a drop of water falling on a stone.
The closer they got to the dump, the more faded plastic grocery bags there were, hanging tattered in the trees. Elizabeth told Joanne that during the winter there would be lines in the snow, just like the tracks of cross-country skis, and at dusk they would fill with what looked like black liquid, something shiny, molten, coursing through the snow, and those were the rats, she said.
Hundreds of thousands of rats. And the rats were starting to be a problem for the city. They were showing up all over. A neighbour had seen one in her garden. There was a squashed rat on the cul-de-sac at the end of Elizabeth’s street.
Then they saw the eagle through the trees. The eagle was over the water, way above, slow moving, or not moving at all, wingspan maybe five feet, Elizabeth said. Something writhing in its claws.
But when she and Joanne broke through the brush to the edge of the cliff and looked down the coast of vertiginous granite all they saw were giant splashes of guano. Elizabeth looked for a long time through the binoculars and then reached into her knapsack and took out a bag of trail mix. She opened the Ziploc seal and Joanne held out her hand.
Where the hell is the nest? Elizabeth asked.
* * *
The girl came into St. Clare’s emerg at 1:27 a.m. on the last week of the cuts (at the hospital, mostly admin), and Mike Andrews, who had been a triage nurse for two years, did a brief assessment, took her vitals, asked about her chief complaint (abdominal pain, shortness of breath), and ascertained that the girl was fourteen years old and in the early stages of labour.
He left a gown for her to change into and said he was going to have the hospital social worker come in and have a chat with her. He told her not to worry about anything, she was going to be well taken care of. He asked her would she like a Popsicle.
We have two kinds, he said, orange and orange. That’s all that’s left out there.
The girl said she’d have an orange one.
He slid the curtain around her bed so she could change.
I don’t want no social worker, the girl said. Her shadow bobbed and ducked and weaved on the folds of the curtain.
Oh, you have to see the worker, Mike said.
* * *
The next morning, in the churchyard behind the dance school, the dog wouldn’t come. Joanne called the dog. But the dog wouldn’t come. The tips of the slender alder branches flicking back and forth, a moving patch of thrashing leaves, flinging droplets of last night’s rain. The dog was not a barker. Joanne had never heard him bark, but he could make a high-pitched whine in the back of his throat that sounded half-human, a trilling-up of yelps.
Once, several mornings ago, he had broken out of the trees with something in his mouth, and he had been making that noise. It turned out to be a dead crow, the maggots white and wiggling in clots over the black feathers.
Now he was making the noise again, his wagging hindquarters swallowed in a tight, wet tunnel of shiny leaves. He’d found something. Joanne thought of the pregnant girl. The girl had seen her there in the churchyard. The girl’s due date. Had she come l
ooking for Joanne? She felt her throat constrict. A lump of panic pressing upward in her throat. Was it the placenta? Had the girl given birth in the alders? The dog making that noise, louder, more piercing, the sound any animal makes when anticipation is so acute it becomes painful. Was it the baby? Was it dead? Joanne pushed through the branches and saw someone had been through before her. A trodden path, branches snapped, hanging limply. As she got closer her skin goosebumped because of the stink.
The stink assaulted her and kept assaulting. It had smelled ancient and sacrificial, and she felt it hammering in her skull. The dog’s elongated yelp and the feral choking sound of him tearing something apart. Then she broke into the little clearing and saw the fierce yellow of the overturned beef bucket.
The dog was sniffing what looked like a blackened, glistening slab of burnt wood, but it was salt beef. Not the girl; not a baby. When the dog’s nose touched the chunk of meat the shiny black coating of flies, sparking emerald and sapphire glint, lifted and buzzed like a chainsaw. Bloody chunks of purplish meat lay all over the ground. There were strings of yellowed fat on the grass, and she was gagging from the smell that rose with the flies in visible waves of sun-crimped air. Joanne kicked the dog away.
Get out of it, she said. Hey, get out.
A membrane of scum or whatever it was had draped itself over the dog’s snout, stretching over his black nose like a burst chewing gum bubble, and the flies were beading his mouth and eyes, and he snapped at them and galloped to her, frenzied with the blood and the buzzing. He dug his forehead into her thigh, wiping off the flies and grazing her hand with his teeth.
She snatched her hand away, and he jumped up and planted his paws on her chest, panting in her face, so close she could smell the raw mineral rot on his breath. And she knocked him down.
Put it down, she said to the dog. Give it to me. Here.
But the dog no longer had anything. He trotted past her and back out to the churchyard. Joanne rubbed her sneaker against the long grass, back and forth, vicious scuffs, trying to get the sole of it clean.
* * *
Five weeks after the cuts, people were saying some positions were being restored. Many positions.
People were beginning to hear this one or that one got his job back. His or her job. If you could make a good case, they might give you your job back. People wanted to know why they hadn’t just left everything alone in the first place.
Marilyn Downey received a call two weeks after being let go, a few days after the sale was finalized on her home in King William Estates. Basically, it was Chad, her former manager, calling with an employment proposal. It was the same job she had before, but she would be rehired a few steps down the pay scale, and there would be an increase in responsibilities.
The Viper’s Revenge
Orlando, Florida. I’m here with a conference of twenty thousand librarians from all over North America, two weeks after the Pulse massacre. It’s very early; I’m jogging around two big, olive-coloured ponds and not a breath of wind, an empty eight-lane highway between the ponds and I’m on the median.
A lizard skitters over the curb and across the highway. It goes in fast-forward but there are glitches. Stops. Goes, stops. Darts. A jellied quivering. The long thin body is still, but the legs. You can’t even see the legs in the bald light. Just a blur of motion.
There are squiggles of fluorescent spray-paint here and there on the sidewalk in pink, orange, and lime. They’re construction directives, targets for jackhammers, indicating the location of water or sewage pipes beneath the concrete, positions for embedded spigots, underground tunnels for workers and who knows what else — bog people, muskets, cannonballs, arrowheads. I took two planes to get here.
Orlando was retrieved from the swamp by a wily entrepreneur who set up dummy companies to purchase the land cheap. A hundred thousand people work in the theme parks here, vomiting in their oversized cartoon-costume heads because you aren’t allowed to vomit in a theme park. It’s hot in those cartoon heads. You aren’t even allowed to die of heat prostration.
People who die on the parks’ premises are secreted away, whisked from the grounds in unmarked cars and why not? Why not have a zone that death can’t infiltrate? It costs fabulously to squeeze into these crowds, to belong.
Of course you offer life without death.
You offer furry animals that speak.
When I’m coming around the second pond the sprayers come on and shuffle out sheets of re-collected water, the sign says. Water that I don’t want to touch my bare skin because who knows.
It’s not true that the wily entrepreneur is cryogenically preserved. That’s an urban legend. People say just his head in a murky aquarium: mouth open, the lower lip looking grey and nibbled, deteriorating despite the formaldehyde, like he’s developed a cold sore, and a five o’clock shadow, because hair still grows in death. Sometimes the head burps and a wobbling bubble escapes a corner of the mouth. A fold-encrusted eyelid flutters. But that is just the underwater air filtration.
This place is where the GoFundMe stage-four cancer children come to fulfill a bucket list. The parks around here specialize in reconstituting hearts—break ’em, put ’em back together. The white beluga in the aquarium will do it for you, all by itself. Defibrillate your soul. The ghostly mammal emerges from the murk, tail dragging because of a low-grade fugue.
* * *
It’s even earlier. I got up at five, to go for the run, wanting to get out before the heat, but I have a coffee, poolside, waiting for it to get light. There’s nobody around, just the girl serving, and outside, the grounds caretaker, cleaning the pool. He’s got a very long pole with a net he swings across the surface. I sit out there at a plastic poolside table, lift my coffee to him and nod.
The pole he has is made of sections joined by plastic cuffs that screw together. Some blue sections, some silver, joined together without consideration for alternating colour. Joined together in the cinderblock shed at the end of the lawn beyond the palm trees that surround the pool deck. A shed that smells of bleach and the damp grass clinging to the rubber flanges of the riding mower, the stinky blue exhaust from the Stilh leaf blower.
The Caretaker is at the end of his night shift, he just has to get rid of the leaves on the grass, and to move this net through the water, creating streaks and gleaming stars on the aqua surface, corrugated lines that go flat and still by the time he reaches the shallow end. It’s a big pool. He walks slowly, dragging the net.
While I slept in the bed, fourteen floors up, he was twisting the cuffs, attaching the pool net, and dipping it to gather debris, about to capture a sodden brown napkin, submerged but still floating a few inches below the surface.
The sun bleeding orange into the blue pool, and he’s thinking about his wife slicing banana into three bowls of Cheerios. The children at the table and everybody talking at once.
His brother-in-law, Angelo, who lives with them, in a muscle shirt, leaning over the little table with a wet napkin to wipe the baby’s mouth. The Caretaker loves his brother-in-law, who is doing a Ph.D. at the University of Orlando in Comparative Literature, who has a scholarship, writing about Gabriel García Márquez, a dude the Caretaker has not read, but whom the Caretaker’s wife has read to keep up with her brother, and to show an interest in his studies. Angelo who pays them rent to sleep on the couch, half the rent for the whole apartment, in fact, and who loves the Caretaker’s children, his little nieces and nephew. Who works out at the gym and is totally ripped, Angelo, and who has almond-shaped hazel eyes, a high forehead, and, like the Caretaker’s wife, black ringlets that hang down thick and shiny. The caretaker’s brother-in-law, Angelo, blinks those eyes femininely, and speaks to the children at the breakfast table in a lazy, sensual voice that is womanish and gentle, though he’s sleepy from working at an all-night carwash down the street and going to school or clubbing until dawn.
We librarians, we care about
books. Do we ever. We do not, like the people here, throw up in cartoon heads. Frankly, we are superior in that regard. The four of us on this acquisitions mission are data systems specialists.
I’m evaluating new software developments for the Queen Elizabeth II Library in St. John’s, the biggest library east of Montreal. Basically I’ll be going from booth to booth, talking to reps, attending talks and panels. I’ll see some nice packages, a few innovations. We come every year, Jack and me and a couple of others from the QEII.
We have the morning for panels, the first on the recent doubling of research data, every decade or so, and how to curate scholarly output, for those of us in university libraries, then a talk on bibliometrics and finally a YA author launching her book. We thread through the people clustering in the foyer of our hotel, older women from the sorority conference with blonde hair and red dresses and tans. They have vellum cleavage, mottled and filigreed. Red-and-silver Mylar balloons, shaped like the letters A, X, O. They are trying to stand in the right order: Alpha, Chi, Omega.
You, Mary-Louise, you need to be in the middle. Snuggle in. Smile. Everybody smile.
At lunchtime, Jack and I walk to the aquarium together. He has a map that flops over at the crease, and wags limply down as he turns in one direction. He stares down the street, then turns in the other direction.
This, he says, stabbing the air twice with his finger. This is the way.
Sweat streams between my breasts and down my back. The top of my head feels hot. We pass a patch of lawn outside a library and it is covered with miniature American flags for the victims of the shooting.
At the aquarium the air conditioning raises the hairs on my arms. They have a moving sidewalk in a glass tunnel. A young woman with pink-tinted sunglasses hanging down from her ears, resting on her lower, pouted lip, is texting and jostling through the people standing still on the moving sidewalk.
