The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  How can I ever get through until Easter, Moises had wailed as they passed the shoemaker’s gluepots. It took your mother forty weeks to grow you, he’d told the jittery boy. Give our beloved Mother Mary Immaculate forty days. One at a time.

  In the chapel, a priest he didn’t know read the harsh warnings of the prophet, Joel. Locusts turning Eden into desolation. They closed his heart again, the conditional promises too much like the language of the pimps and police. Of Vinicio. Eloise, looking across to him, read St. Paul’s call for reconciliation. He held up his hand to refuse communion. But the superior’s thumb smeared ashes on his forehead and spoke the words Álvaro had said to the children, the man’s voice transfused with the same love he had felt flowing directly from the mystery of transformation into the children’s open hearts: “Lord, bless all who receive these ashes.”

  His longing for Janna had little of this sanctity. It was formless desire, a thin veneer over his emptiness. As such, it would do her no good. A week later, he listened dully to the superior’s plan to involve Walter. An advocate for the girl and a lawyer who specializes in these cases. This involves all of us, he’d said when Álvaro protested. An Oblate never acts alone, no matter how much he might wish he could. The lawyer is there to protect us all, the girl included. To answer any unexpected questions. In the meantime, it might be best if Álvaro moved back home.

  It was not a suggestion, Álvaro realized on the bus ride back to the Colemans’. It was an order. The damage control was about to begin. It was out of his hands and he felt like an old man when he clambered off the bus into the drizzle to make the transfer, waiting in the doorway of a coffee shop for the next number ten heading west, deeper into the riches of Point Grey. Those who wanted a cup of coffee murmured politely as they pushed their way past the wet travellers, shrinking away from the soaked raincoats, ducking under the dripping umbrellas. Álvaro’s bus splashed up. He found an empty seat beside a grey-haired woman, her purse firmly held on her lap. After they talked about the weather and the way the crocuses were showing nicely in spite of it, she asked him where he was going.

  His answer surprised him. “Out to the university. To see my daughter.”

  “A student?”

  “Yes. She’s studying business.” His pride was inordinate. “She won a big scholarship.”

  “You must be very proud of her.”

  “Yes. She works hard.” He didn’t know why he was saying this. “But the rest of the family…it’s never enough.” He shrugged.

  “Uh oh,” the woman said.

  Álvaro nodded. “I’m trying to patch things up, but they’re all stubborn.”

  Her little snort of derision startled him. She snapped the clasp on her purse open and shut several times. She reached for the cord to signal the driver to stop. As the bus slowed, she took his arm. Her eyes were milky. “Don’t get caught in the middle,” she said.

  He stood and helped her up as the bus pulled into her stop.

  “She’s your daughter. You’re her father. That’s between the two of you and nobody else’s business.” She spoke as if from her own experience, her own regret.

  “Thank you,” he said to her coat of turquoise wool. “Thank you.”

  He leaned against the window as the bus lurched back out into the traffic. The houses along Tenth Avenue were all clearly delineated behind the bare branches of ornamental trees, the tidy patches of lawn and black dirt showing splashes of colour where bulbs poked through.

  By the time the bus arrived at the university, the wind had blown the rain away. The students moved fast, huddled down into their soaked sweatshirts and flimsy windbreakers. Damp air seeped through his jacket and chilled his shoulders. He shifted them, longing for the warmth of Guatemala City, its crowded streets, the bodies close and jostling, people yelling back and forth. He stood under the shelter, undecided. The possibilities opened before him: he could turn and leave and he might bump into her; he could knock on her door and she might not be there. Or she might be there with a lover and his stomach clenched at the thought. He might have a heart attack and die right here. How complicated this was going to be. He was living an elaborate fantasy. Like the street kids stoned and jittery, waiting for the raised eyebrow, the nod from the cruising johns. Or hoping for the rescue van sliding open the door to refuge. Or burrowing their faces in the little bag of glue.

  The place he went after his body betrayed him. After the pain that was nothing like illness or injury, nothing like the crawl of death up the nerve endings of the body, nothing like these because it was pain that could be stopped in a second at the will of another person. A finger raised and it ended. A slow afternoon, a fly floating in the boredom of a cup of coffee and it began. The place where he inhaled the glue to erase the touch of Vinicio’s razor along his jawbone. The sight of Clara’s loathing. The knowledge of his own complicity.

  17

  Janna stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for the traffic to thin, dancing from one foot to another, trying to keep warm. The rain had let up, but the wind was still blowing. She followed three women through the opening in the trees, happy to get off the pavement and feel the leaf litter cushioning her feet. She’d forgotten how beautiful the trails were, how the trees buffered the noise of the cars and the bite of the wind. Her weeks of studying and illness had drained her strength and the women soon outpaced her. She kept going, nodding at people coming the other way, moving over as others passed her. She followed two men for a while as they discussed the best kind of process for suturing head wounds, an exchange as relaxed and amicable as if they were discussing movies. She kept running through the dizziness and the uncertainty, waiting for the fatigue and despair to pass, waiting for the place where you forgot you were running, forgot you were tired and were just present in the thwack thwack of your feet hitting the wet leaves, watching for roots and puddles, but it just wasn’t happening and it was getting darker and darker and she was suddenly aware of how alone she was. No one had passed for several minutes. And David’s words came slithering back, the viciousness of his thrusting finger.

  Isabel, she thought, must have danced on the edge of danger all the time. There’d been bruises sometimes, and scrapes. She’d found her once on the back deck, slumped in a chair and wrapped in a blanket. Not wanting to come in, she said, until she felt human. Not wanting to pollute the house. Outside air always helped cure a hangover.

  Janna forced herself to slow down and finally stop at the next trail junction. She was no longer sure which way to turn — the wind was still blowing in off the water and the treetops were bending and whispering like the white noise traffic makes in the distance. The staccato footsteps of a lone runner came up behind her, a man in shorts and T-shirt, sweatband around his head, thick curls poofing out around it. She asked him for directions and he pointed; she nodded and watched him run off deeper into the trees, the gloom gathering him in until his movement became vague shifting shadows and he faded into the darkness. She turned and before long could see headlights in the distance and the opening in the trees that would take her out into that stream of light, of people, of music playing, news reports, cellphone conversations, back seat squabbles, and the general substance of being that she was not part of, knowing how blind they were to everything outside the beam of their headlights, outside the roadway. Blind to the possibility of the moose on the side of the highways up north, ready to step out into the road and explode your world into shattering glass and crumpled metal.

  She picked up her speed and ran down the tunnel of trees, out onto the sidewalk, breaking through at last into that comforting exhilaration of a body doing what it’s meant to do, running, running, and she crossed the road and ducked into the shortcut along the Japanese garden wall and the open square in front of her residence. And there he was, David and his two friends, waiting by her door. She stopped, still in the shadow, heart pounding, pleasure draining out of her body and leaving her limp and terrified. She put a hand in her pocket, feeling for her cell. Ins
tead she found the little bag of worry dolls. Little Christmas girl in there with her adopted family, trying to get along. Refusing to take any shit. Fuck this, she thought and walked toward them. David, she called out, businesslike, calm. I owe you an apology.

  Even before they grabbed her and backed her into the darkness, she knew she’d made a mistake. Her stupid little trick had started something she had no way of getting hold of. She was in a black tangle of venom, of hands twisting her arms, another reaching inside her jacket, grabbing her breast and yanking. David, backing away as the others shoved her along, kneeing her in the groin, spitting in her face, snarling out words she’d never heard and others she had. Hick bitch. Squaw whore. Skank. The pain scoured her. She tried to scream but a hand came around and covered her mouth, smashing her lips against her teeth. She was being attacked in full view of the lit rooms of dozens of students; the speed with which they did their damage showed they knew what they were about. It was only then she started to fight and it was useless. The pain was everywhere.

  “Help,” someone called out, running toward them. “Let her go!”

  And suddenly she was flung against a tree and fell face down in the dirt. “We’ll be back, bitch,” David hissed and she heard footsteps pounding away.

  She slumped there, trying to spit out the dirt in her mouth. She closed her eyes against the roar rising in her ears and placed her forehead against the rough bark of the tree. Saliva pooled in her mouth and she was stumbling through her mother’s backyard in darkness, dirt on her hands, dirt itching around the roots of her hair, looking for her mother. Looking and crying, in some terrifying aloneness. The moon finally finding her and finding Isabel at the same time. Her naked body splayed in the dirt, her breathing hoarse and ragged. Janna tugged at her arms, calling at her to get up, get up, until her eyes finally fluttered open and she knew where she was.

  She was still crying when she became aware of an urgent voice, anguished, some accent she couldn’t identify. He reached out hands to help her up and she sank against him for a minute, feeling his solid bulk, his hands gentle on her body.

  She’d twisted her ankle, and something wrong with her ribs made every breath a sharp jab. She stumbled with him back along the path but she did not want to go into the light. She tied her scarf around her head and hunched her neck into her jacket, hiding. She wanted to go to her room, but she was afraid of being alone. She was afraid of being alone, but she didn’t want this man to see her. To know her.

  “We need to call security,” he said. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “They’re gone, aren’t they?” She looked around wildly, afraid of the light, afraid of the dark. “I’ll be okay. I just need to lie down.”

  He spoke to her quietly and walked with her through the pools of light and darkness to her door. He waited while she scrambled for the keys. He asked again who he could call, but she left him there, watching through the glass until the elevator door slid shut.

  She rode it up, trying not to breathe, pushing past the group of students talking in the hall outside her door. She wondered what showed on her face as she slipped between them, into her room. If they even noticed the scrapes. She stood in the dark, her back against the door until they wandered away. She felt her way into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and turned on the shower. The water stung as it hit the scratches fingernails had made on her breasts. The scrape on her face when she’d fallen, her split lip. As she stood under the hot water, she cried, hearing again the contempt in David’s voice. The names. She cried and cried even as she turned off the water, dried herself, put on her pajamas, and crept into bed.

  The shadows of trees moving across the streetlight blurred in her tears. There was another world out there, one a thin crack away, violence buzzing under a skin so thin you could see right through it. Isabel had somehow made Janna believe it was a world she chose, one she liked. And everything she saw that night she left home confirmed that. Sitting there in her boyfriend’s car waiting for him to come out of the pub with a case of beer, Janna saw a man and woman stumbling outside, his hands all over her. Shoving her into the shadow of a garbage bin, the laughing woman half pushing him away as he unzipped his pants and lifted her skirt, fucking her up against the brick wall of the pub. Janna had been close enough to see the way her mother’s eyes changed when she saw someone watching her. She’d liked it. That had only changed when she realized the watcher was her daughter. That was the moment when Janna stopped making excuses for Isabel. The moment she made her boyfriend take her home to pack two cardboard boxes of clothes while Isabel circled her, drunk and blubbering, saying she was sorry, it wouldn’t happen again.

  Janna had stepped around her, tucking a stuffed lamb from Trevor, a picture of her brothers, and a small case of jewellery into one of the boxes. Isabel drunk and shouting at her as she carried her boxes to the car. Isabel throwing shoes and jackets onto the hood of the car, go, Janna’s cold order, go, and the boy driving her away, the tires bumping over the only thing Janna regretted, the new runners Isabel had bought her when she finally made the track team.

  But now she could not get the taste of dirt out of her mouth, the memory of her mother’s body gasping for breath, lying in the dirt of her own garden.

  18

  He’d better do something, Margaret told Álvaro when she found him standing, soaked and distraught, in the alcove off the kitchen. He was reciting the names of the lost children as if by doing so he could bring them back to life. He recited all the ways he’d failed them. Not found them the help, the homes they needed. Teased them when he should have been tough. Tough when he should have been tender. He told her about watching outside Janna’s building all night. Her mother needs to know, she’d insisted. That girl needs her family.

  “I am her family,” he said.

  A flicker of contempt thinned her lips. “Be that as it may,” she said, “but she doesn’t know you from Adam. You can’t just jump in unannounced.”

  Álvaro had a desperate thought — maybe she did know about him and didn’t want anything to do with him. Maybe she’d known all along. Just another, what did they call them, deadbeat dad?

  Margaret held out the phone.

  Still he hesitated. Janna’s resemblance to Clara had sidetracked him, really. He had been thinking all along, he realized, as if Janna was something between him and Clara. Since he’d seen her, he hadn’t been thinking about Isabel at all. And she exploded back into his memory. The way she’d laugh as she tickled one of the boys, her pleasure in their helpless giggles and wriggling joy. In his own. He hadn’t heard Janna laugh. Maybe she laughed like her mother.

  “Maybe Isabel’s not the person to tell. There must be a reason Janna doesn’t call her. And if she wanted to talk to me, she would have, long ago.”

  Margaret shook her head in exasperation, the little silver crosses of her earrings slapping her cheeks. “Has no one told you? She’s looking for you.”

  Timid Eloise, always turning away when Margaret fumed about the old boys’ club of the church, was as impatient as Margaret with this one. A friend of Isabel’s — an aunt? She’d been asking questions about him, but the superior was stalling.

  “The girl doesn’t know about you. Her mother wants to know where you are and what you’re doing before she tells her.”

  Álvaro took a deep breath and dialled the number, his heart pounding. He got a man’s voice on Isabel’s answering machine and couldn’t bring himself to leave a message. He hung up in distaste. All those men, Walter had said. There was always someone. But no one for Janna. No one she could call. This city, her baranca. Some kids were discarded and some, he knew, threw themselves away.

  “You need to see her for yourself before you make that judgment,” Margaret insisted. “It’s not something you can do over the phone. I’ll contact the aunt. It seems she knows you.”

  Thomas drove him to the bus depot, the rain sluicing the streets, the wind whipping up False Creek in
great gusts. As the bus rumbled out of the sodden city, the familiar wire of dread reverberated across the hollowness in his stomach and the old buzz crackled in his ears. As the Fraser Canyon rose steeply around him, the snow heavy on the cedars, he held himself with the same careful balance he had learned in the darkness of the prison cell after his torturers slammed the door and left him alone. Before their footsteps died away, he was preparing himself for their return.

  During the long bus trip through the dreary winter towns, Álvaro tried to convince himself he was a different man than he’d been six months earlier on the journey from Guatemala to Vancouver. He was not afraid of the driver’s uniform anymore. When the bus picked up a basketball team in Williams Lake, he was not afraid of the wires trailing out from the earphones hidden under the boys’ toques. When a man near the front of the bus reached across the aisle to take a wailing infant, Álvaro was only momentarily afraid for the baby’s life.

  You’ve done well, Chris had told him at the end of his last visit. You’re stronger than you were last fall. Now take a break from Guatemala. Do what you have to do here.

  As the bus lumbered through Fort Fraser and west toward Fraser Lake, twenty uncomfortable hours north of Vancouver, Álvaro saw the sign advertising the Rose Prince pilgrimage at the site of the old LeJac residential school. Walter had promised to take him that summer so many years ago. Show him a couple of good fishing spots. Not likely now. Not likely at all.

  As he crossed the bridge spanning the ice-choked Bulkley River, he let himself finally think of Isabel and all the ways he’d travelled since he left here so long ago. The years etched in his body. He had no idea what to expect. When he stumbled off the bus into the dirty parking lot in Smithers, the cold made him gasp. The wind blew swirls of sand off the icy roads into his face, the tears from his watering eyes freezing to his lashes. A woman standing beside an idling car said his name. A slender woman, her scarf framing a smooth face, laugh lines deeply incised around the dark eyes, she waited, hands in her pockets, watching him through the billowing cloud of exhaust. There was something of Isabel in her smile.