The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  The fragrant smoke brushed like soft feathers across her skin and something sweet and strong slipped in through her nostrils, tightening her throat and sinking deep inside her lungs, her blood, and out into the nerves and muscles of her arms and legs. She looked down at the body she had kept so carefully covered, at the pale patches between the mottled purples and reds, the bruised nipples, the ribs jutting out. The fingerprints encircling her wrists reminded her of David’s tattoos, of his girlfriend’s neck and wrists; goosebumps prickled every hair.

  She closed her eyes and listened to Amy say her name until it blended with the sounds of the traffic on the road and the voices of students passing just a few yards away. She wondered if anything had changed.

  “Any brilliant illuminations?” Amy finally asked.

  “What exactly would that feel like?”

  “Point taken.”

  “I do feel better. Not so afraid.”

  “Might have worked better if we’d thrown on a couple of fat weenies,” Amy said.

  Janna burst out laughing. “A wiener roast. Come to think of it, I am hungry.”

  “Well, that’s another first.”

  As they emerged from the evening darkness into the orange illumination of the courtyard in front of Janna’s residence, Amy called out to a man walking their way. She pulled Janna toward him. Janna stared at him. It was the man who’d rescued her. He was wearing the same thick navy wool jacket and black toque. Black jeans and running shoes.

  “You remember Janna, Father Al. You were there when she made that memorable exit from Coleman’s.”

  That was where she’d seen those eyes before — looking up from his plate, horrified as she listened to Thomas Coleman talking about rape. When he refused Amy’s invitation to coffee, ducked his head, and walked away, he said nothing about rescuing her. Why was she relieved? She tried to keep her voice disinterested. “I’ve seen him around. Is he taking courses?”

  “He went through some bad shit in Guatemala. Those scars are from torture. He’s having some crisis of faith, I think. Seeing a counsellor, trying to decide what to do with his life.”

  “He’s a priest?”

  Amy shrugged. “Who knows anymore? He may be on his way out. He doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything right now. He was great with the street kids down there. He’d go anywhere to haul one out of trouble, but he wouldn’t take any crap from them either.”

  Janna wondered what you did if you’d been a priest all your life and then wanted to stop.

  “He told me that once you’re a priest, well, you’re pretty much always a priest, even if you quit. You take this perpetual vow and in God’s eyes, you’re always one of his. Even the ones who’ve gone and gotten married. Crazy, eh?”

  Janna claimed exhaustion and hugged Amy. Thanks, she said and promised to try Isabel again.

  When the elevator door closed, Janna hugged herself, as if the smoke on her clothes and in her hair would keep her safe. Her room smelled of bleach. She opened the window until it touched one of the branches of the skeletal trees lining the walkways leading away from her residence. Under the shelter of an awning on the adjoining building, two people stood, smoking. The fear prickled through her. She’d seen the priest there at least twice. He’d been watching her even before David grabbed her.

  She pulled the bottle of painkillers out of her bag. The blister pack of tranquilizers. Set them on the counter beside her computer. She was not overreacting, she told herself. She did not need a pill. He’d been kind, but there was something screwy about him. He was not, she told herself, dangerous. That didn’t mean he wasn’t creepy.

  What does a sane girl do when she’s worried, she asked herself, looking at the tranquilizers. She doesn’t take a pill. She pulled Christmas girl from her pocket and sat her on her pillow. Then she pulled her phone out of its little plastic pocket on the strap of her pack, took a deep breath, and dialled Isabel. Holding that breath through the message, she wasn’t sure if she wanted someone to pick up or not. She spoke to the machine. Can we talk, she said, and left her number.

  19

  Álvaro spent the flight wondering how he could make it up to Isabel. To Alice, who’d paid for his ticket. How could he ever repay everyone? Get a job pumping gas? Translating tractor manuals? He could do that. Levers and pistons. Tires and transmissions. His future felt like a shrinking tunnel, the walls moving closer and closer together, his Catholic god shrivelling to a cartoon head bobbing on a dashboard, voice rising, speeding up into gibberish, a frenetic babbling. Isabel had joined the ranks of so many women he’d misjudged, his fears and fantasies punctured by the photos on the mantelpiece of her tiny living room. She was not what he thought she might be. She was not his. She was not Janna’s. She was inside her own complicated skin. The only thing left was Janna. Isabel had given him that. He’d asked the taxi to drop him at the university.

  His courage faltered when he saw her with Amy. They stood there through her awkward introductions, neither of them knowing where to look as Amy babbled about spirit cures and the benefits of copra. He had to remind himself that the young woman standing dishevelled and flustered, the cold bringing colour to her cheeks, was Isabel’s daughter. His and Isabel’s. She was not Clara, nor was she Clara’s even though she had the same smell of smoke Clara often had when they were children. There was always something burning in Guatemala.

  Still a priest, Amy had laughed when he warned her against dabbling in things she didn’t understand. The light-heartedness of her dismissal and Janna’s embarrassed refusal to acknowledge him quelled the vague fantasy he’d begun to build about slowly getting to know her, and discovering the truth together. A moment of shocked realization followed by sweet reconciliation. It was all he could do not to shout it out right then and there.

  Later, he wished he had. He was putting away the breakfast dishes at the Colemans’ when Margaret handed him the phone, her eyebrows raised in a question. Isabel. A different Isabel. A giddy rush.

  “She phones me last night all shy and sniffly and I’m thinking, man, you move quickly and this is going to be easy, why did I wait so long when I realize she doesn’t know. Some bad date has reminded her of her mother’s several dozen bad dates and she thinks maybe I’m human after all.” Isabel’s words tumbled out louder and louder and Álvaro took the phone into the library, wandering around staring at the Aztec rugs hanging on the walls, barely hearing what she said, his heart thumping.

  Could he maybe hold off talking to her? I’m coming down in a few weeks, she said, and we’re going to get together and maybe I should be the one after all to tell her. He should understand her difficulty — all those years of hearing nothing, assuming he knew about Janna and didn’t care, and then he shows up. He must understand, he must give them a little time. Her voice that of a parishioner trying to make a salvation deal with her priest.

  “I asked her about the hospital and everything and she says she’s doing okay now. Amy and a friend have been taking care of her. She’s doing well in her classes, she’s going to be fine.”

  Álvaro was suddenly tired of all the things in the Colemans’ house. He was tired of paintings, of statues, of rugs, of masks, of vases of dead grass and huge pots of living plants. He thought longingly of the small room he’d been given at the provincial house. Sometime today, he’d pack his small suitcase once again and move back. Maybe he’d take one of the pills the psychiatrist had given him.

  “Thanks for calling,” he said, the priest’s polite response. “I did you a disservice, appearing like that. Let’s just keep talking. See how things go.”

  When he handed the phone back to Margaret, he turned away from her questions. He grabbed his jacket and walked out into the bright morning. A flock of small dark birds chattered and twittered in a tree drenched in shrivelled red berries. He stared at them for a moment, trying to see some pattern in the rise and fall of their movement. When they rose in one huge swirling streamer, he followed them down to the water and turned h
is feet toward the university.

  20

  Janna ran on the treadmill, wishing the bruises had faded enough for shorts and a T-shirt. Next week. She sweated through the stiffness in her calves and the tightness in her chest. But she was here and she was going to keep coming. She was going to again feel as good as she’d felt when she was on the high school track team. When the exercise increased her energy until she could do everything — work part-time, ace her school work, and go shopping with her mom. Even statistics would stick.

  Through the window in front of her machine, she could see down to the bottom of the climbing wall and up to where it rose to the ceiling high above her head. Two people in helmets, tights, and T-shirts were roping up. She might sign up for lessons once she’d got everything sorted. She’d laughed at herself when she’d finished talking to her mom and sat down to make a list. Welcome back, Janna, she’d said.

  The treadmill’s timer beeped and she started her cool down. Maybe she could leave some flowers at Professor Coleman’s office, thanking him for whatever it was he’d done to warn David off. No, she’d have them sent. She didn’t know how much Amy had told him and didn’t want to.

  Below her, one of the climbers moved toward the wall. Then a figure spidered up from the other side; he was wet from the pool and barefoot, his big hands clamping onto the rocks like thinking creatures, his feet feeling and testing for holds. She held her breath as he paused right across from her, twenty feet off the floor where there were now four people yelling up at him. The long muscles threw lines of shadow along his arms; the curve of his buttocks showed through the wet shorts and his calves bunched and relaxed then bunched again as he pushed off and angled away from her, still climbing. He reached out and slapped the ceiling, then closed his eyes to let his feet feel their way down across the whole width of the wall until he was at the opposite floor shrugging his way through the little band collected at the door. Janna’s treadmill beeped again, signalling the end of her session. She laughed with a kind of crazy joy, the zap of a kind of energy she hadn’t felt for a long time. As she showered, she sizzled with it.

  She didn’t falter even when she saw Amy’s friend, Father Al, standing bareheaded and windblown at the entrance to her residence. She’d been half expecting him. He wasn’t anything to be afraid of, she told herself, glad to see the warmth in his eyes. He’d helped her, he’d saved her, really. When he asked if he could speak to her in private, she invited him upstairs.

  He hovered in her doorway as she hung up her coat and pulled the chair out from her desk. Chattering to fill his silence, she set him on the seat, poured him a glass of ginger ale, and offered him a granola bar. She was going to move out next semester, she thought. This was ridiculous, this cramped little room with the bed, the clothes, her Tampax box on the counter. Everything on display.

  The man’s awkward silence reminded her of Greg. The pressure building. Why had he come? She thanked him again for his help and asked for contact information should she need him as a witness. She didn’t plan to press charges, but just in case. Otherwise, she was quite all right. He sat down, holding the slip of paper and pen she’d handed him.

  He opened his mouth, about to speak, but she kept going. “Amy tells me you’re thinking of leaving the priesthood. That must be a difficult transition.”

  He set down the pen and paper. Then he reached up and took her hand and pulled her down to sit in the chair across from him. He took both her hands in his and ran his thumbs across her knuckles, across each one of her fingernails, smoothing back her cuticles. One finger brushed the shadowed bruises still on her wrists. The warmth of his hands, their roughness, unnerved her. She tugged lightly, but he held on.

  “Look,” she said, pulling harder. “You’re making me very uncomfortable here. You’re going to have to let go.”

  He finally looked up at her. “I’m really here to talk about your mother.” His voice cracked.

  “My mother?” Janna blinked. “You know Isabel?”

  “I think you could say that,” he began.

  She remembered Amy’s story of the priest at her door in Guatemala. This same priest, telling her that her mother had died. Oh no. Not Isabel. Not now. “What’s happened to her?” She clutched at him.

  His hands were still stroking hers, soothing, like she was a child. She stared at them in terror, the thumbnail suddenly in perspective. The way it curved around the finger, deeply embedded with perfect cuticles.

  “No, she’s fine. It’s not that.”

  She turned her own hands over, turning his with them and looked at his fingernails.

  “We’ve both been trying to figure out the best way to tell you…” he broke off, uncertain.

  Roaring, everything roaring. She looked at their hands tangled up together and struggled to extract her fingers from his grasp, from the fists they’d formed. She and Trevor used to play this game when they were little, her little fingers trying to pry open his fist to see what treat he held inside. She saw her mother’s hand reaching down to take hers as they walked home from school, home from buying an ice cream cone, as they crossed the railway tracks coming home from the lake. She saw that same hand turn hers over and trace the lifeline in her palm. Her father’s hands, Isabel had said. She had her father’s hands. She flung Álvaro’s hands away and jumped to her feet.

  “You sneaky bastard,” she hissed, shoving him toward the door. “Following me around like some pathetic pervert. And Isabel. All sweetness and apology. What a pair of cowards.” She pushed him out into the hallway, glad for the anguish on his face. Doors opened and a few kids stuck their heads out.

  “Why don’t you both just die,” she cried out. “Just fucking die!”

  Part III

  21

  Isabel woke up in the back seat of Trevor’s crew cab, eight hours into the drive to Vancouver. They’d finally left the remnant snow behind, snow that had come late and piled up so deep it was still blanketing the shaded corners of her garden. But there was heat in the sun now, and the bulbs she had planted at the ranch would be poking up under the snow-covered straw and her mother’s peony would be stirring into tender red-stemmed life.

  The rising sun cast long shadows through the pine trees and sagebrush scattered across the scoured hills of the southern Cariboo. She sat quietly, not wanting to interrupt the quiet music of Trevor and Soryada’s Spanish.

  When she was a little girl, it took three days to make this trip from Smithers — one day east on the gravel road to Prince George and then another two south on the narrow band of miraculous asphalt that led to Vancouver. Her dad would stop to talk business along the way: the smell of fresh-cut pine at a small sawmill, the fishing camp down on the Fraser flats, the horses at the ranch just south of 100 Mile. She’d wander with her mother through the herds of range animals, restless after being cooped up all winter.

  Now, as they sped past all the little towns and ranches, she was still that girl wearing her new summer outfit — blue and yellow checked shorts and a white sleeveless shirt trimmed with matching checked collar and pockets. Her legs sticking to the white leather seat of the 1959 New Yorker, she’d sat between her mom and dad snapping her yellow flip-flops and pink bubble gum until her dad threatened to throw them out the window. She was still the teenager wearing her boyfriend’s sweater, so long it almost covered her miniskirt, leaning back against the passenger door and stretching her legs across the seat of his graduation present, the 1968 Mustang, her white boots restless and teasing in his lap, her white lipstick leaving marks on each cigarette’s golden filter. She’d egged him on to pass every car whose bumper they rode, Jason already flipping around inside her. And then Jason himself driving the 1987 Cadillac De Ville to Vancouver for his dad, sneaking her and Trevor and Janna along so they could see, what was it, the Abbotsford air show?

  All those girls flickered through her, images with no more substance than the glimpses of flattened grass around the boarded-up summer resorts and abandoned ga
s stations Trevor’s truck flew past. She was speeding toward Janna and Álvaro, toward some reconciliation, she hoped. Or some further breaking apart. Whatever happened, on the other side of it, they would all be changed. This Isabel wearing a new pair of stretch jeans, a red cotton sweater, and a plaid fleece vest, half asleep in the back seat of her son’s new Ford 350, was going to join all those other girls inside her.

  A logging truck passed them going north, its tires catching the gravel on the shoulder and sending up a cloud of dust, an explosion of scattered light in the sun now clearing the eastern hills. She pulled her brush out of her purse and ran it through her hair. Trevor grinned at her in the rear-view mirror.

  “Morning, Mom.”

  “Any more coffee in that Thermos?” she asked, a yawn cracking her jaw.

  He shook his head. “We’ll stop soon. Soryada needs to use the bathroom anyway.”

  Isabel leaned forward. “How’s your tummy?”

  Soryada turned to Isabel and shrugged. She never complained about the nausea but all she ate were crackers. The shadows around her eyes were dark splotches. Isabel reached out and pushed her forward so she could brush her hair. Soryada closed her eyes and bent her head against the tug of the brush.

  “Any day now and you’ll be feeling better,” Isabel said. “Then we’ll fatten up you and the baby both.”

  By the time they drove into Cache Creek, Soryada was asleep on the back seat. Trevor asked Isabel what exactly was going to happen in Vancouver.

  “Janna’s birthday party is still on, according to Amy. At some fancy house out near the university.”

  A road sign directed traffic east to Kamloops and the Trans-Canada. Trevor drove past it.

  “Janna’s going along with this?”

  “It was her idea — she didn’t want to see either of us alone.”

  “She wants an audience for some big scene?”