“Heaven help us.”
They both burst out laughing, then choked it back, not wanting to wake Soryada.
“You still like this guy?”
She had tried to remember what it was about Álvaro she’d been so drawn to. Not just his beautiful voice with its exotic accent. His agility with a soccer ball enchanted boys and girls alike, and she hadn’t been the only woman to notice the muscles under his sweat-soaked T-shirt. He’d been enthusiastic about sex too, as if by close attention, he could, in her body, decipher God’s intent. She had felt holy, radiated with passion by a kind of language the men of the Bulkley Valley did not speak.
“There’s nothing like anger to keep your feelings alive for someone. I mostly hated his oh-so-holy guts every time Janna asked me about him.”
She wasn’t sure what she felt now. “Do you remember him?”
Trevor shook his head and accelerated to pass a tanker truck. “Maybe I’ll recognize him.”
“Not likely. He looks nothing like he used to.”
In her lowest moments, she’d imagined Álvaro a smooth talker cutting through the women in the Winnipeg parishes like a mower moving through the hay, leaving them strewn on the ground smelling sweet in the heat of summer. Whether or not he’d known about Janna, he was a coward for running away, the church like some rich parent saving its precious son from the trampy girlfriend. At other times, she had still dreamed of some kind of rescue. But the sight of his body crumpled and whimpering under her kitchen table had changed everything. She squirmed at the memory, at the way it diminished him. He had, she figured, suffered enough punishment for just about any sins he might have committed.
Trevor dodged through Cache Creek’s light morning traffic, fiddling with the radio, looking for a sports report. He’d bought tickets to a Canucks game, extras for Isabel and Janna. It had seemed like a good idea when Isabel and Janna had their first careful phone call, planning the visit before she knew about Álvaro. Before Trevor knew.
Isabel had come home from work a couple of days after that phone call to find Lance spreading out maps on the kitchen table to show her where he’d gone on his first trip back in the field, a snowshoe hike to survey some slide damage on the Skeena. He’d been telling her how good it felt to be in the bush again. One arm rested on the table, his finger tracing his route on the map, his body tired and relaxed, his hair still wet from the shower. She’d envied the snow itself then, because she’d never seen him so engaged, his eyes clear and happy. When he asked about his son coming to stay over for the spring break, she’d said of course and pressed the play button on the answering machine. Trevor saying, what was this he heard about Janna’s father? Amy saying, I’ve always said you were an amazing woman, Isabel Lee, but I am surprised at this one. But nothing like Janna is surprised. Don’t worry, I’m right on it, even though it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. And then Janna on the last message, the flat voice of her worst anger saying please don’t call because she did not want to waste the money it cost her to retrieve Isabel’s messages and there was nothing she could possibly have to say that Janna wanted to hear.
Lance had poured her a glass of juice as she paced the house raging into the telephone, Perro following her, yelping when her angry feet shoved him out of the way. By the time she’d finished talking to Trevor, Lance had rolled up his maps and taken the dog for a walk. When Álvaro phoned to apologize, she was glad she could look through the window and see Lance turning the compost in the fading light, the sight of his body a charm against the anguish in Álvaro’s voice. Against her own guilty relief that she hadn’t been the one after all.
Someone else had broken the news and others worked hard to bring about a reconciliation. All she had to do was show up, she told herself as she’d cleaned the house and bought taco chips and pop for Dustin. He liked amphibians and computer games, Lance told her. And basketball. And as much as she found herself charmed by Dustin’s unselfconscious questions about everything in her house — the photographs, the seedlings, the old-fashioned light switches — she was happy, she told herself, when Trevor picked her up that night, happy to put at least one entanglement behind her.
But once on the road, she realized with a hunger that could still surprise her, what she really wanted was to buy a mickey of whiskey and go for a ride in Lance’s truck to some little lake in the bush where the ice had melted around the shore leaving an opening just big enough for a couple of ducks to paddle in. To park the truck and sip whiskey until the warmth ran from her belly down into what her mother called her girl parts, and fuck that man’s body until all the metal they’d put in him heated up so he was as flexible as he must have once been. Melt the stiffness right out of his bones and make them both forget they had children tethering them.
Soryada rose up groaning from the back seat. Trevor pulled over and held her as she retched into the ditch. A few half-hearted flakes of snow drifted down from a cloud snagged on one of the canyon peaks. Isabel poured water for Soryada, worried for her and the baby. Snow swirled off the tires of the big tanker wheeling by, the whole pickup shuddering on the trembling ground.
This was shaking them all up, Isabel thought. They could all be broken by what came next, broken even more than they already were, even Dustin with his computer set up in her living room, his salamander in its cage on the mantel beside the photographs of her kids. He watched her with his father’s eyes, trying to decipher where he might fit into this household. Whether she and Lance were lovers, knowing as well as she did all the possibilities of pain in forging these new links. Lance tried to reassure them both by acting as if everything was fine. Snowboard lessons up the hill. Videos. Dinner at friends of his ex’s with kids Dustin knew. And somewhere in Vancouver, Álvaro and Janna.
She climbed down from the truck to give Soryada the front seat.
“Right about now, I’m tempted to cross the highway, stick out my thumb, and head out across Canada,” she said to Trevor.
He opened the back door, his laughter a balm. “Not on your life.” He lifted her inside, tickling her until she was laughing too.
“We’re going to get this sorted,” he said as the road dipped down beside the river, brown in its first flood. “No more sneaking around, no more secrets. We’re going to all be in a room together and we’re going to figure out how to get along. I’m going to tell Dad’s family and, if you’ve got the brains I think you have, you’re going to tell all your friends because once the moccasin telegraph is activated, word will spread fast.”
Isabel tried to think it through. Alice knew and she’d know how to tell the rest of the family. Isabel would tell Jasmine and Alejandro when they got back from Costa Rica. Jasmine would tell Frank, wherever he was. As if he’d care. She wondered if Janna was in touch with any of her high school friends, if they’d already been told. “Oh God,” she said. “What am I going to say to the women at work?”
“Maybe we should just put an ad in the paper,” Trevor said. “Somewhere between the wedding announcements and the obituaries.”
“The store should give me a raise. It’ll be great for business.”
Soryada spoke. “I have been reading the places where they say who has had a baby.” She held up the Smithers newspaper, folded open to the classified section. “Maybe you could do that.”
“Isabel Lee and Father Álvaro Ruiz would like to announce, belatedly, the birth of their daughter, Janna Catherine Lee-Ruiz,” Trevor started.
Jason, Isabel thought. The last time she’d seen him was at New Year’s. His silky hair under her fingers. “What about Jason?”
“I phoned him.”
“You had no right.”
“I had every right.” Trevor was angry.
Soryada said something in Spanish. Trevor continued. “Janna’s crying, asking me did we know all along? Were we laughing at her all those years?”
Trevor flipped hi
s finger at a truck driver who passed him on the right, and accelerated past him again.
“The first thing I’m going to do when I meet the man is shake his hand and tell him thank God somebody finally let it out ’cause sure as hell you never were.”
“I was getting ready to tell her.”
“Bullshit,” Trevor said, slapping the steering wheel.
Soryada put one hand on Trevor’s arm, pointing to a rest stop. He shook her off and sped past it. She spoke up, insistent. The tension finally slackened in his shoulders. She touched him again and he flipped on the signal, nodding. They pulled off to the ragged edge of the asphalt under the pillars of a huge sign advertising a water slide. Trevor turned off the truck and spoke without looking at her.
“Jason asked me to tell you not to bother to call.”
Isabel gulped.
“He said some things it will take a while to put right.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His T-shirt stretched over the broad back and a line of paler skin showed on his neck where she’d trimmed his hair. On one ear, the studs they’d teased him about when he first got them, glittered. Years ago now. Janna still living at home, happy when her brothers dropped by, all of them friends. Trevor and Jason swapping music, talking cars, electronics. Going fishing. She looked up at the cliffs rising on the other side of the river and tried to imagine herself a mountain sheep on the tiny paths Trevor had pointed out to her. If a sheep could keep an eye on her kids in that terrain, she ought to be able to negotiate her way through the next few days.
Trevor started the truck. “We’ll just keep going for now and do what we can about Jason later.”
Isabel’s skin tingled with a thousand barbs. She wanted to jump out of the truck, cross the highway, and stick out her thumb. There’d be someone who would pick her up. At the very moment she most wanted to shake free of all her obligations, she also longed to feel a proprietary hand on her body.
The truck shuddered as a convoy of semis roared by.
†
Janna arrived first. It would be easier, she had told Amy, if she didn’t have to make an entrance. As soon as she pushed open the back door, her anxiety diminished. The air smelled of fresh bread and furniture polish. Of emptiness. In the kitchen, the counters were covered in platters, bright cloths mounded over the heaping dishes for what Greg had taken to calling The Reunification Party. She trailed a hand along them on her way to the living room. Masks on the wall, plants, and a couple of couches arranged to face a fireplace. Logs ready to light. She moved into the hallway to the photograph of the two boys flinging themselves into the air. They’re having fun, she told herself, trying to forget David Miro’s voice pointing out the possible danger lurking under the water.
She pushed aside a bead curtain and looked into a small alcove at the end of the hall. A candle flickered under a crucifix. El Colegio del Corazón Valiente and In Memoriam were spelled out above it. Photographs of kids hung on either side — one with black eyes, a girl with a bruised face, a skinny little boy dancing ecstatically in water spraying from a hose, a bigger boy holding a soccer ball. Moises Osorio †1999. Juan Tzul †2000. Armand Guzman †1998. Emilia Estuardo †2000. Marta Barillas †2000. Three frames held flowers pressed under glass. Ana Elisabeth Yax †1998. Lucía Madriela †2000. La niña †1970.
Corazón Valiente. That was the name of his school in Guatemala City. A whirlpool swirled down into her stomach as she realized these children were all dead. She put one hand against the wall to steady herself. She tried to pronounce the names, wanting to hear them spoken out loud. They were all dead and the man who was her father would have known them. Talked to them, played with them, prayed with them, and fed them all while she imagined him driving a truck, or riding a bus on those empty northern roads. Baling hay or falling trees. All that time not knowing about her. The fact of Álvaro López Ruiz lodged in her throat and she couldn’t force it back up or swallow it. Her father. How is it you could create a child and not know? What lunatic would devise such a system?
Janna had slammed the door in her face. She thought Amy had known he was her father and had been setting up their meetings, telling stories about what a great guy he was down there in Guatemala City.
“It’s me or the goon squad,” Amy had shouted through the door.
Janna ranted on the other side about how she’d lived her whole life politely answering women who kept asking her how old she was, when her birthday was, and watching them count backwards trying to figure out who had knocked up Isabel. Some of them must have known. That old priest telling her she was not a result of immaculate conception, and besides remember God made sure Mary had a husband when she had the baby Jesus, and there were some things best left unspoken, and he’d probably known himself, known and what? Laughed?
By this time, she’d opened her door and seen the fear on Amy’s face, fear about Janna’s sanity. When she’d told her that Father Álvaro Ruiz was her very own long-lost daddy, thank you very much, well, no actor could have faked that stunned disbelief.
“You’re not the only one who feels stupid,” Amy had said. “Talk about a cluster fuck.”
Janna had refused to be babied. The anger scoured her into clarity. A haphazard DNA cocktail was not going to dictate her destiny. She went to class and went to the gym, Greg throwing exam questions at her as they rode gym bikes together. She sent the flowers to Thomas Coleman’s office. She signed up for the intersession courses she needed to get back on track with school. She’d said she didn’t want to talk to either Álvaro or Isabel and neither of them tried to contact her.
It was when she phoned Trevor, left a message, and didn’t hear from him for a week that her anger shifted into uncertainty. Into fear. He had been a shield from Isabel all these years, but also a link. Assuming the door would be open whenever she chose to return. If she lost Trevor, she didn’t know what she’d do. When she phoned him again, she could hear the weariness in his voice. Other voices were raised in the background. And she realized his fatigue might be coming from places that had nothing to do with her. That he might well have his own problems.
“I wouldn’t mind getting out of here,” he said, “and I don’t want to waste those hockey tickets. What do you think?”
“Come,” she’d said. “Come. And bring Mom. We’ll get this sorted, somehow or other.” And she hung up before she started crying, crying in big shuddering sobs that scared her. She was so tired of pretending she was fine. She was so tired of feeling, period. She was so tired. She hoped that if she saw Álvaro and Isabel in a room full of people, she might get used to it. If she overheard them talking, saw the way he put food on his plate, forked it into his mouth. The ways you get to know a stranger. Strangers.
Janna drifted up the stairs and looked into a bathroom still damp from a shower, steam on the mirror. Toothbrushes spilled from a cup beside the sink and thick towels were crammed onto the towel racks. Then the room where she’d been put to bed back in January. Where all the kitchen sounds came up through the heating vent. She crossed the hall to the master bedroom with its double bed neatly covered with a bright blanket. Under an ornate crucifix in dark wood, another candle burned. Janna stopped in front of the big window looking through bare branches over the tops of the houses to the water below, and ran her fingers across the dusty top of the ornate chest set under the window. It was decorated with painted carvings of the slender leaves and creamy calla lilies her mother was always trying to bring into bloom. On the top, a series of photographs of the boy, Joseph. A lock of hair curled up inside the frame.
A mother cherishing a child, she thought, and remembered the line of photos on the mantel in her mother’s house. From somewhere, the air from an open window lifted the hair on her neck. She followed it to the room across the landing, to the single bed with its one white pillow, a colourful blanket, and the edge of a white sheet folded over. Over the bed, the o
pen window. Outside, a tree’s new leaves were unfurling. She knelt on the bed and reached for one, wanting to feel its veins beneath her fingers. She remembered again her hands in her mother’s.
“I hope you have a good life,” she’d said to Janna, “because it looks like you’re going to live a long time.”
The young leaf was smooth, its veins mere promises under the translucent green. Janna lay back, her head on the pillow, and twirled the leaf between her fingers. She tried to imagine what was coming after this moment, what kind of life. She’d been reading about Guatemala. She was terrified of what she read, but she couldn’t stop. It was everything Amy ranted about, and more. It was heartbreaking. Good people tortured, murdered. Lies about everything. People she was related to lived there, negotiated their way through the chaos and violence. Or didn’t.
Far below, a phone rang. Three times, and it stopped, the silence spreading back through the house. It was then she noticed the painting at the foot of the bed.
Oh, she thought. It was as if something alive was in the room with her. A pale girl standing on the rim of a bathtub dressed in summer shorts and a T-shirt looked out of the picture. In the blue behind her, a fish and a bird, upside down. The girl held her hands out for balance and Janna felt herself teetering, the porcelain cold against the arches of her own feet, feet that were big and clumsy. Here I am, the girl seemed to be saying with her hands and feet and hair, her eyes and mouth. Here I am. What do you see?
Janna wanted to cry because the girl was somehow not put together right. Her head was too big and her skin was so blue and cold, Janna wanted to take her jogging in the sunshine until the sweat shone on her collarbones and a flush came to her cheeks. It’s what she should be doing, Janna thought. She should be running while she still had the chance, running until she heated up into something real, something alive.
Instead, she settled herself down to wait for the others to arrive.
†
The Taste of Ashes Page 26
