She saw his confusion and quickly introduced herself. Isabel’s aunt, Alice. More memories and more shame. Alice Black. That summer she’d left the Montreal convent to rethink her vocation before taking vows. They’d had long talks. His passion for Isabel had heightened his passion for everything and his faith had burned right through all the contradictions. Until he realized she was Isabel’s aunt. Until he waved at her one day on his way to meet Isabel. She’d been sitting on a bench on Main Street, the boys with her, all three licking ice cream cones. Babysitting while Isabel walked down to the willows beside the river.
He refused her offer of breakfast, a shower, maybe a rest. These women, he thought. Why do they suffer us?
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” she said driving him through a town he barely recognized. He had never seen it in winter, its squat homes hunkered down between snow-laden hedges. Clouds hung low over the mountain and blowing snow almost obscured the train yards where boxcars clanged and squealed in a haze of orange light. Alice parked the car. Across the road, smoke rose out of Isabel’s chimney. A narrow path between clipped grey shrubs led to the neatly shovelled stairs. The porch windows were frosted white.
“She doesn’t know I’m here?”
Alice shook her head. “I wasn’t sure. I wanted to talk to you first.”
Álvaro shook his head. “Please,” he whispered. “I need to get this done.”
†
On Sundays in winter, Isabel lit the wood stove. It took the chill off the house in a way the oil furnace never did, especially when it was twenty below and the wind whistled through the gaps around the old window frames. She sat back on her heels to watch the fire take hold. As the draft roared up the chimney pipe and the stove heated up, the metal creaked and crackled. Perro lay beside her, chewing on a stick of kindling.
Last night Trevor and Soryada had taken her out to dinner at the only restaurant in town where people dressed up. The one up on the highway in the hotel that belonged to her aunt’s family. Lance had been spoiling her she’d realized as she choked down the ham steak special. He was always bringing home wild food from friends’ freezers — huckleberries, salmon steaks, a venison roast — and he knew how to cook.
Not wanting to disappoint Trevor, she’d sawed and chewed and listened to his excited plans for the spring. Soryada, head down, mashed her food together and sculpted it into different shapes. The fork never rose to her mouth. Isabel had finally shoved her own plate aside. She’d leaned across the table. “When is it due?”
When they told her the date, she laughed and said New Year’s Eve. She asked Soryada how she was feeling, told her how she shouldn’t drink any alcohol even though she didn’t really drink at all anyway, how she had to eat properly, get enough rest, but be sure to get exercise too. The same way she talked to all the girls she worked with, first time pregnant. And then it struck her. She was going to be a grandmother. A line of blood, a direct link with the baby growing inside the girl across the table, a girl who grew up in a place Isabel couldn’t even imagine.
“Will my grandchild speak Spanish?”
Soryada spoke a soft phrase. “It’s grandmother in my mother’s language,” she said. “I’ll teach the child to say it. In Spanish also.”
“Abuelita,” Trevor said. He leaned back in his chair, his shirt straining across his chest. They’d be getting married, he said.
Isabel had smiled back against the thickening in her throat and, appointing herself the honorary mother of the bride as well as the groom, pulled Soryada into a hug. Part of her longed to tell them about Álvaro, wondering when she was going to hear from him, or about him. She tried to place him in a family portrait — standing behind Janna, a hand on her shoulder, Isabel on the other side. Speaking Spanish with Trevor and Soryada and her grandchild. She still saw herself in that portrait as a young woman, and Álvaro was a young man.
The fire finally got going and Isabel slipped upstairs to get dressed. Perro’s claws clicked on the linoleum as he went into the kitchen where Lance was making a fancy breakfast to celebrate the news. She’d told him last night. He only went to Terrace every other weekend now, his access to Dustin restricted. In his quiet formal way, he’d apologized for his New Year’s Eve behaviour.
She asked him if his drinking had anything to do with restricted access. Cause or effect. He’d hesitated until she told him a little about her own drinking. About Janna’s anger and distrust. You do the one thing that makes sure you can’t have what you want most, she said. They say it’s the booze you want most, but it isn’t that exactly.
He nodded. But she wasn’t going to tell him that it was the man on the other side of the barroom table or beside her in the truck cab. There’d always been a man to drink with. And since Álvaro, there’d never been a man without the drink.
He didn’t expect her to believe him, he’d said, but he’d never been what you’d call a drinker. He didn’t really like what it did. His wife thought that was funny. She and her crew would return from a shift on the railroad and he’d come home to a party, Dustin pouring the beer. His anger and his fear for the boy an unwelcome rebuke. He still didn’t really know how it happened, but she had friends who swore he was unfit. He didn’t have many friends of his own. And once word gets out that you’re a drunk, everything that happens has an explanation. Even his car accident. A moose on the road is always a good excuse, people say, and by the time they found him he’d have sobered up anyway. It’s not that I don’t ever drink, he’d said. But I’m not very good at it when I do. As she had seen. He’d leave at once if she wanted.
Instead, she’d offered to have his boy come — I’m used to boys, she said. It would be fun to have one around. He said he’d see what he could do. It was complicated at the other end.
It wasn’t until Isabel stood looking at herself brushing up her hair into a twist, her mother’s locket gleaming in the V of her new shirt that she realized he was courting her. And that she was interested. She smelled the eggs and toast with great pleasure. She hadn’t felt this kind of anticipation since waiting for Álvaro’s phone calls and twenty-two years is a long time.
Janna’s birthday was in a month, she told Lance as she swallowed the eggs. She’d be twenty-one and most of the way through school on her way to some kind of a life. By the time Isabel was twenty-one, she was divorced with two kids and back home living with her dad. Maybe if she wrote her a letter, telling her about the baby and the wedding, she’d come home. For Trevor’s sake at least.
She hadn’t told Lance much about Janna. That’s what she liked about him. He didn’t pry. She hadn’t told anyone about Alice looking for Álvaro. The way the church seemed to be stonewalling her. She was just wondering out loud how Jason would react to Trevor’s news when someone knocked at the front door. Opening it to a blast of snow, she was surprised to see Alice. She’d usually be at mass this time on a Sunday. She was even more surprised to see someone behind her, a man wearing an old navy pea jacket like she hadn’t seen since she was a kid, a black toque pulled down low. With the scar along his chin and another one splitting one eyebrow, he looked like a cross between a reformed junkie and a wrestler. Some Indian, maybe, on a wrestling-for-God mission.
She welcomed them into the crowded hallway.
“Just wait until you hear my news,” she crowed, tucking Alice’s scarf inside the sleeve of her coat and hanging both on a hook she’d cleared off. Turning to take the man’s jacket, she waited while he pulled off his toque. His short hair stuck up in a mess of cowlicks. It would be a bugger to cut, she thought and even as she thought that, the man looked back at Isabel, his dark eyes alight, his mouth turning up into a tentative smile. Isabel stepped back, looking from him to Alice for confirmation of what she was already beginning to guess. They froze there, Alice and her friend, waiting. Isabel was waiting too, waiting for the emotion she could feel coming, she could almost hear its roar rising like trains did at night sometimes, roaring down the long straight stretch through
town without slowing, coming closer and closer, a great thundering shudder that set the swampy ground trembling and rattled her old house so hard dishes fell and shattered.
She backed away from the concern on her aunt’s face into the tangle of coats hanging on the hooks behind her and cried out with the same anger and loss she’d felt when the priest told her that young Father Álvaro had gone to Winnipeg where he was sorely needed and no he hadn’t left her any messages. No messages for twenty-two years and now, without warning, this battered man.
Perro came scrabbling in, barking and jumping up to lick Álvaro’s hands. He set the dog’s paws down gently on the tumble of boots and coats. “Forgive me, Isabel. Alice tried to talk me out of appearing like this, but I insisted.”
Isabel heard his voice, how the accent was almost gone. He looked from face to face. “Seeing Janna has made me impatient.” He reached a hand toward her.
She jerked back and turned to Alice. “Did I hear that right? He’s met her?”
Alice sighed and nodded.
“You can imagine my surprise.” He tried to laugh.
Lance was standing in the doorway. He called the dog and squatted beside him, settling him with gentle strokes. “Do you need me, Isabel?”
She turned toward him and shook her head. She put a hand on each shoulder and turned him gently around, leaning her head onto his back and pushing him into the kitchen saying, “This is family stuff.” They stood like that for a minute and then he was gone out the back door with the dog. Turning to invite the others in, she felt the draft on her back as if her skin had been laid bare. She wanted him back. She wanted to start the morning all over again, to retrieve the feeling of quiet possibility. She wanted his hand on her somewhere, the way he put it on the dog. She wanted him to still the anger bubbling up.
Álvaro followed her into the kitchen. “Isabel, Isabel, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Alice said. “Give her a minute, Father.” She pushed him into one of the chairs, the cooling cups of coffee and the half-eaten toast still littering the table. The open jar of gooseberry jam Alice had made.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” Isabel said. She stared at him, sitting there in her kitchen, in the same chair she’d placed right there when she first moved into the house. Black circles of fatigue ringed his eyes and grey stubble speckled the dark skin. The scar on his chin ran down his throat and under the neck of his black T-shirt; his shoulders and arms strained its seams. He had bulked up since he was a young man. On one wrist a watch, on the other a woven bracelet. His fingers brushed at the crumbs on the table, pushing them into little piles.
“Still tidying things up, I see,” she laughed and threw him a dishcloth. Alice filled the kettle and plugged it in. She pushed Isabel into the other chair and set about making toast and coffee.
Catching the wet cloth Álvaro felt a kind of vertigo, a frightening buzz of interference between him and his body sitting at this table, between himself and Isabel’s stare. Remembering what Chris had taught him, he struggled to ground himself. He catalogued the things in Isabel’s kitchen. A calendar picture of cows grazing in a golden field, snow on the high mountain beyond. A refrigerator covered with photographs. A poster of bright flowers. Beside each flower, shrivelled bulbs that looked dead. Dirt still clung to the roots and for a minute he saw the brittle hair of corpses.
He forced himself to look at her, but could not raise his eyes above the golden crucifix resting in the V of her shirt. It was a locket, he remembered, with someone’s hair inside. Her mother’s? All that remained of the figure carved upon it were thorns on the head and the nailed feet. Everything in between was smooth. Her hand came up to take hold of it, two fingers rubbing it. The skin on the hand was reddened, loose over the tendons. The polish on the fingernails was chipped. How could these be the fingers he had so joyfully taken into his mouth? He looked up at her mouth saying his name. He looked away, remembering where that mouth had been.
“Well,” she said, grinning. “Here you are.”
His mouth opened and closed. Why, he wanted to ask again, hadn’t she told him? The two plates littered with scraps of toast, the man with the dog. It seemed an explanation. He spoke. “She doesn’t really look like me, does she? I guess you couldn’t be sure she was mine.”
Alice groaned.
“And you are?” Isabel’s smile disappeared, her voice cold.
“I have a sister,” Álvaro said, stumbling over the words. “She looks exactly like her.”
Isabel picked up a lid from the table and screwed it onto the jar. “Lots of girls look like Janna. You go out to the reserves and you see all these pretty little part-Indian girls, the slim ones, they look just like her.”
“There’s this patch of white hair.” Álvaro’s hand touched his right ear. “Just here.”
She picked at something stuck to the outside of the jar, her eyes down. “So what does she say?”
“She doesn’t know.”
Isabel looked from Álvaro to Alice. “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Alice told her how Álvaro had been staying with a Catholic family near the university, people who also happened to know her friend, Amy Myerson. How she’d met Janna at school and brought her there. Álvaro had seen her, had heard that Isabel was her mother. He’d figured it out, but hadn’t known what to do.
Isabel slumped in her chair and covered her face. “My God, what a mess.”
“Why a mess?” asked Alice. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Here he is. It’s no coincidence. It’s meant to be. Now figure it out.”
They both stared at her.
“Oh, I get it,” Isabel said. “The God thing.” She shook her head. “No offence, Alice, but I don’t see God in much, much less this. I’ll leave that to you two.”
Álvaro said nothing, the buzzing in his ears growing louder. He hadn’t thought of God for what seemed like months now. When he prayed it was to something else altogether, something he’d have to think about when his feet were back on the ground, when he wasn’t in free fall. He pushed back his chair.
“Where are you going?”
He pointed upstairs.
“Oh. Yes. I guess you know where it is.”
They both listened to him slowly climb the stairs, his tread that of an old man.
“Isabel?” Alice hesitated. Isabel looked at her.
“What?”
“What did happen between you and Janna?” Alice was determined. “One day you’re friends, the next day she’s moved out.”
Isabel pushed back her chair and stacked up the magazines sliding off the end of the table. She was not going to tell her about the night her careful defences had crumbled. The night outside the bar, that boozy excitement against that brick wall, still warm from the day’s sun, a yes, yes, yes, heightened by the fear of discovery that always gave it the edge she liked. The pub doors opening and closing. The headlights just missing them. The eyes watching from the parked car. The terrible moment she’d realized it was Janna.
She stood with her back to her aunt, aligning the photos on the fridge. “Alice, I don’t need anyone’s help to hurt my children. I’d hoped that finding Álvaro might go some way to making amends for some of my screw-ups with Janna, but now when he’s right here, I don’t see how. We might need her, but she doesn’t seem to need either of us.”
“I guess she’s maybe not doing as well as you thought.”
Isabel’s stomach flipped. She turned, one hand full of magnets, the other holding photographs. “What?”
Alice looked away. She told her about the hospital calling Amy Myerson, how she’d failed one of her exams, and how she’d dropped some classes after she’d been in the hospital.
“The hospital? What happened?” The magnets and photographs fell in a heap on the table.
“She’s not talking much, I guess.”
“Except to Amy? Why her? Janna never even liked her. And the boys? Isn’t she ta
lking to them?”
“One of your boyfriends, right?” Álvaro was standing in the doorway. “Or maybe one of the brothers.” He’d seen it a hundred times, seen the children on the streets because they were safer there than in their homes. “One of them tried something with her, didn’t he? That’s why she doesn’t come home.”
The jar of gooseberry jam flew before he could duck. It glanced off his shoulder and crashed into the sink full of dishes beside him. Splinters hit his cheek. The coffeepot fell off the counter and shattered on the floor.
“You filthy-mouthed pig,” she said. “Don’t you dare go near my daughter.”
He backed away, glass crunching under his boots. “They were right.”
“They?” Isabel turned to her aunt frozen by the back door, one hand covering her mouth. “And who might they be? What might they be right about?” She screamed, “What aren’t you telling me? What’s happened to Janna?”
Álvaro’s outrage almost carried him through. But the terror in her voice cut open the air and darkness leaked in. He looked down at the leather of his boots, dark against the blue and yellow squares of linoleum, wondering why the crunching fragments of glass didn’t cut his feet. He felt something at his thighs and put out one hand to hold the table. He struggled to come back, back into the understandable anger in the ordinary kitchen where the windowsills were piled with envelopes and gardening magazines and striped leaves trailed from a salt-stained pot. But a fragment of a broken cup, gold shining on the curve of its rim, was lodged in the dusty foliage and he was gone again, gone to the place they’d dumped him, kicking him off the road into the garbage-filled ditch.
When a hand reached out for him, he scuttled under the table and curled up as small as he could. Lord, open my lips, he said, waiting for the cup. Lord, open my lips, he said, waiting for the cattle prod. Lord, open my lips, he cried, the Spanish bile in his mouth.
The Taste of Ashes Page 23
