‘I decided a long time ago. I’m just telling you now,’ she said.
He wanted to tell her everything, and he would, if she would ask the right questions.
She wanted him to be only this.
Tristan felt like lying down in the bottom of the canoe. He thought of the girl Marie who’d sat in Keb’s boat all those days. He’d watched her, waiting for her to try something.
‘Come in the water,’ Tomasin said, telling him now. ‘Come, Tristan,’ she said.
He slipped into the water and brushed off the last bits of sand she’d put on him, and for hours they waded in the shallows and filled the bottom of the canoe with rocks and driftwood. Tomasin saw faces in the wood and told him to look. She saw the wings of birds and the more elaborate wings of angels. ‘Bird or angel?’ He told her, ‘Whatever you want.’
They pulled the canoe up and stretched out on the rocks beside it to dry off in the wind and sun. Tomasin peeled out of her jean shorts, wrung them dry, and hung them over the side of the canoe.
‘You should take off your wet clothes,’ she said.
He didn’t want to. They were already drying.
‘I wish we had something to eat or drink.’
‘Drink from the lake.’
‘I always forget that.’
They laughed and stayed outstretched, their hands cupped over their eyes for shade.
‘I can’t sit up,’ said Tomasin. ‘Now that I’m down, I’m down. I can’t even raise my hands.’
Tristan agreed, and they laughed more because their bodies felt not their own but sunk into the rock.
‘If you weren’t here, I might have died of thirst. We should always be together,’ Tomasin said, ‘or something bad might happen.’
Tomasin didn’t know what she was doing with him, if he wasn’t going to give in. He knew what he was doing, what he always did.
She was at shore getting a drink, cupping her hands, when she felt him touch her shoulder.
‘Hey,’ she said, dropping the water and turning to knock his hand.
‘Hey,’ he said, bringing his hand back to her shoulder.
He was putting something on her arm, the same way she’d put the sand on his hand. But when she tried to brush it off, it stuck, a thick, claret black, and Tomasin thought it was dried blood.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried at him, spitting on her hand and rubbing her arm, but she couldn’t rub it off, only in.
‘It’s okay.’ He wanted to explain. It was something his mother had put on his shoulders for sunburns. He would tell her.
‘It won’t come off,’ she said, disgusted.
‘It will come off.’
‘Tell me what it is.’
‘Why are you angry?’
‘I’ll hit you,’ she told him.
‘Don’t.’
‘I’ve seen people do it to you.’
He was trying to tell her.
‘What is it with you?’
If she wanted to hit him – if it would make her feel better – then he would let her do it. His face was already hit. It didn’t make any difference.
She’d been waiting for him to touch her and now this. ‘Tell me,’ she said, pointing at her shoulder, holding her arm as if she were holding a fresh injury.
He wanted to tell her. His mother had put it on him as a child. She’d rubbed it into his shoulders.
‘You like it,’ she said. Tomasin stood and jerked, threatening to follow through: ‘I’ll hit you.’
‘Don’t,’ he said.
But he didn’t care and she could tell, stepping through herself and swinging. She hit him in the side of the forehead, a small packed blow.
‘Oh!’ he cried, taking his head in his hands in a crouch. The rocks were ragged and sloped toward the water. He didn’t want to fall down there.
‘Why did you cry out?’ Tomasin shouted at him. ‘Why did you just cry out?’ She was disgusted with herself and with him. She’d never heard him cry out the other times. She worried about what it meant, readying herself to hit him again, should it be necessary.
Tristan didn’t try to defend himself, only told her, ‘This isn’t good for you.’ It wasn’t good for her.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Do you feel better now?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But it’s not for me. I hit you for you.’
On the right side of his forehead, just above the eye, bluish lines pushed through the skin like veins from exercise. When she swam as hard as she could, the veins in her forearms bulged like this, but around these lines there was a red and then a white rim. They were marks from her finger bones in tricolour, and Tomasin thought of her favourite popsicle, the Rocket, with the same colour scheme. She would never be able to eat that popsicle again without thinking of this.
His eyes were tearful. So were hers, but she didn’t know. Why was everything up to her? Why was he crouching over like that? Why didn’t he stand or fall? One or the other. She wanted to hit him again, at least one more time.
She went into the water because there was nowhere else to go.
Tristan eventually sat down and held his head and fingered the bumps she’d given him. He couldn’t think, only feel the bumps. He mapped them to her fingers.
They stayed that way for what seemed like a long time, ignoring each other and thinking only of each other.
It was a tin for peppermints. He twisted the lid and it was full up to the rim with a black cream. Using two fingers, he peeled some out and spread it across the back of his hand and rubbed it in. ‘It’s sunblock,’ he said.
Tomasin hated the way he was concentrating. She wanted him to concentrate on what mattered.
‘Who showed you this?’
‘No one.’ He wanted to tell her.
‘What is it?’
‘Poplar tree,’ he said. ‘It’s rotten. It gets soft like this and you can dig it out. It makes sunscreen.’ When his mother remembered, she would put it on his shoulders. She only remembered sometimes. Other times, his shoulders peeled until the skin was mottled bright pink and white.
‘I can’t believe you touched me with that shit.’
It was painful to be on that shore, so immense and at peace with itself, and to be so small and so at war. The air was full around their faces and necks, but a strange breathlessness overtook them. The branches over their heads swayed and the brush behind them shook in the wind, but they couldn’t easily breathe.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ she spat out.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You could act like a normal person.’
‘I would.’ He didn’t want her to be unhappy with him.
‘There’s what you want me to think about you and there’s what I think, and they’re not the same, Tristan,’ she told him.
He didn’t want her to think anything. He wanted her to stop shouting at him. When she shouted, she ruined her mouth. She put her body in her talk. Her bare legs tightened against him.
He put his head in his hands to hide his face. ‘I don’t feel well,’ he said.
‘You’re religious, do you know that? You do something to me, then you want the pity.’
They were in the Crib, rocking in chairs that weren’t rocking chairs, balancing on the back legs, taking pleasure in feeling the legs bend.
‘You can want a lot,’ Tomasin said, the back of her head pressed against the wall for balance.
‘Like what?’ asked Jer LaFleur, joining her by rocking back and pressing his head against the wall too.
‘Hi, Jer.’
‘What are you talking about now?’ he asked. She was always talking.
‘You can’t want what he wants.’
‘Who?’ Jer couldn’t talk in riddles and balance. She needed to be specific or he needed to sit down. ‘Do you mean Tristan?’
‘He tried something.’
‘Tried for you?’
‘He reached out and touched me. I wasn�
��t even looking.’
‘He got his hands on you! Is that what you mean?’
‘He didn’t even say anything,’ said Tomasin. ‘Not my name.’
‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ Jer said, bringing his chair back to ground. As tough as he was, he didn’t like being hard on people.
‘He didn’t get away with it. I hit him in the head.’
‘In the head?’
‘Right in the face.’
‘So, what are you worried about? Sounds like you took care of it.’
‘I think it’s what he wanted. He wanted me to hit him,’ said Tomasin.
‘Why?’ asked Sean, who’d been watching them.
‘He lets you beat him in the face because he doesn’t like how he looks,’ she told Sean, still balancing.
Jer was ready to catch her. He thought she would fall.
‘You help him,’ Tomasin told Sean.
‘I do not,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t like his own face, that’s what I think.’
‘I don’t help him, Tomasin. I don’t do anything.’
She rocked forward and reached her hands across the table toward Sean. She wasn’t offering her hands but showing them.
‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘you don’t help him. But only because it won’t work. If it could work, then you would be helping.’
‘What are you on about?’ asked Noah Coke, interrupting her to make her stop. To him, Tristan was a little boy, and a boy like that couldn’t do anything wrong that mattered.
‘He has this stuff,’ she said, pulling her shirt down at the neck to show them her shoulder. ‘It’s cream. What boy puts on creams?’ She showed them a burgundy circle on her shoulder. ‘Do you see? That’s where he touched me.’
The boys started to laugh because they didn’t know what else to do with her. Noah Coke wasn’t laughing. He knew that Tristan had put sunscreen on her.
‘It’s not funny,’ she said.
She kept her shirt off her shoulder.
‘I don’t know,’ Adrian whispered to his brother.
‘You don’t know what?’ Sean whispered back.
‘She’s not right about everything. Not like she thinks she is.’
‘I don’t care if she’s right,’ said Sean, ‘and I don’t think she cares either.’
§
She always came, but if she wasn’t coming, then he couldn’t wait and would visit the docks and bail the boats. He usually bailed to feel the earliest sun – the docks faced due east – and to be close to the water before anyone else was awake, to smell the oil and gas and ropes. Sometimes he bailed out every boat, then the others came down and no one knew it had rained in the night. Today he bailed because Tomasin had not come to see him last night or this morning. He had waited for her. He lunged with the bailer, scraping the bottom of the boat, spilling half the water back. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong, so he didn’t know how to work it off. He knew it wasn’t by bailing these boats.
‘What do you need?’ Anuta asked, stopping him at the door.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello? You have to wash your hands before you come in here.’
He left and came back holding out his washed hands.
‘So what do you need?’
He didn’t need anything. He tried to get inside, but she blocked the door. ‘You still can’t come in. We’re working. I don’t know why I told you to go wash your hands. It doesn’t make any difference.’
There was something desperate in names, thought Marie. She didn’t want to yell his name after him. ‘Hey!’ she shouted, ‘Hey!’ Her love for Tristan stood in front of her like another person she had to shout over and climb around. She would climb overtop. She would claw. She would somehow put love down, though she wasn’t confident she could: she had never done it. After all, love was unwieldy – when she reached out, it grabbed back, grabbed her wrist, and twisted until her fingers went numb, love did.
If love stood between her and the world – if it interfered with her knowing anyone – if this was how it always was, maybe this was who she was. This was her, running after him down the path, unable to say his name. He didn’t turn. ‘Please!’ she tried. She would give him the letter she’d written. It was tucked in the bottom of her tackle box under the weights. She didn’t have any good lures, so no one would ever sort through them and find her letter, she was safe.
She ran but tried to make it look like she wasn’t running. She ran every few steps.
Tristan heard her coming close. ‘Have you seen Tomasin?’ he turned to ask.
‘Tomasin?’
‘She was supposed to meet me,’ he said, looking into the near trees like he might find her there.
‘Tomasin?’ asked Marie, trying to understand, looking where he was looking.
‘She’s missing.’
‘Tomasin is sick with a fever. But Mum says she’s not sick. Maybe she is. I can never tell with her.’
It was time for Marie to go back, but she looked across Tristan’s face a few times. She couldn’t look straight at him and take it all in. His eyes were a sore black. There was a cracked scab down the middle of his bottom lip. What she cared for above all – his eyes that were almost his mother’s – had little to do with her own life. How could that be right?
‘I’m going,’ Tristan said, not knowing kindness to recognize it.
‘All right.’
‘I’m going,’ he said again, because she kept looking at him like she didn’t understand.
‘Why did you run away? Why did you do that?’ asked Anuta.
‘I didn’t run,’ Marie answered her mother. She had tried not to run. She had run every few steps.
‘Be better than that.’
‘No, I can’t,’ Marie said.
‘You can’t what?’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You can’t help opening the door and throwing yourself down the stairs after him?’ said Anuta. ‘You can.’
‘I can’t.’
It was something Marie had always suspected but never wanted to admit. She couldn’t be anything. She was what she was, crying through closed eyes. She couldn’t make her eyes listen. She couldn’t make her heart listen and stop its pounding below her throat. Her heart was what it was, in damp darkness. She put her hand over it. Why keep knocking at her chest when she was coming to answer? She was always coming as fast as she could. But the knocking was behind a wall, and there was no handle, no latch, no little hole to stick her finger in. She could only dig the tips of her fingers into her ribs.
‘Well,’ said Anuta, worried now, not by the tears, but how Marie was grabbing at her own ribs.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I could have let you just come back in. But I have to tell you when I don’t like something, Marie, when I don’t think it’s good. I have to tell you when I don’t like someone.’
Marie convulsed at being told not to do what she would do again. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing right with him either.’
‘I don’t like that idea.’
‘Go wash your face, Marie, and wash your hands.’
She went to the sink.
‘Not the sink. Go to the wash basin.’
Tristan went to Tomasin’s cabin. He found her on her feet. If one can wander in a small room with little furniture and only a few things, that’s what she was doing: wandering around her room. And she was doing it in perfect health.
‘Sick?’ he asked through the screen door.
‘Yes,’ she answered, trying not to smile, though she didn’t try very hard. She couldn’t believe how easy it had been. She had prepared herself to wait days for him.
The island had its depths where people could get lost. It had cloaking cedars. It had pines so high and tangled with sky they blocked out the sun. The pines cast shade in patches like cool rooms set deep in a house. The more light of day, the darker and cooler these backrooms were
. When she came down from her cabin, tucked high over the shoulder of the lodge, Stella could be imagined instead to be coming from one of these rooms, out of nowhere you’d been, at least not with her. She came out of nowhere. She was someone’s daughter still, though maybe also a mother. Where were they now, her children? She was an actress, but played only once or twice a year because she did not like the parts for women in plays and films. On stage or an island, on a porch in the morning, stirring her coffee with her finger, just like this, Stella was of interest. More subduing than a migraine, she somehow became what you were doing. If she didn’t acknowledge you, it felt personal. Emiel was annoyed with her and the day had just begun. The way she stirred with her finger and kept stirring long after the sugar was dissolved – this was personal. It all was, he thought.
When Emiel wasn’t in the city he had a headache. What he would have given this morning to walk in a shouldering crowd, to be held up by the press of bodies and voices, and carried he did not care where. He had never understood vacations. He didn’t know what to do with himself here. He didn’t know what to think about. ‘This place is desperately calm,’ he said to Stella. He had never wanted to come, but his father made him. ‘What am I supposed to do here? Am I supposed to meditate, Stella? Are you meditating?’
‘I am not.’
‘I have a headache.’
‘You always have a headache.’
‘I’m not asking for your sympathy.’
‘You want to have a headache,’ she said.
‘I do not. Why would I want that?’
‘For something to do.’
‘No.’
‘You’re always doing it to yourself,’ she said. ‘We all are. It makes us great: we think about something a certain way and it exists. If we don’t, it doesn’t.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like your headache.’
‘And what else?’
‘Everything is like that.’
Stella was on her way to the docks when she saw the girl that interested her. She liked this girl because she had long legs and didn’t know what to do with them. She wasn’t an athlete, but held a strong posture coming from her hips, set high and pitched forward. Her hip bones stuck out above her jeans like a boy who wakes up and does two hundred sit-ups each morning. She might have been graceful if she were not so obviously restless. There was an unhappiness about her, vague, but it could be used. If this was Stella’s prodigal daughter, where had she been? It didn’t really matter. She was here now.
Shot-Blue Page 12
