“Should I find out?” she says.
He dribbles the ball down the ally. “What about your dad? How’d he feel about it?”
Janna tells him she doesn’t think it’s his business, really. But she doesn’t know him very well, she says, and explains as best she can about Álvaro and Isabel, leaving out the priest part. “Holy,” he says, drawing out the o and doesn’t understand why Janna is laughing so hard.
“Are you coming to the wedding?” she asks.
He shrugs. “We’re going out to Lance’s tonight. He says there’s going to be a lot of coming and going and we’ll be in the way. And you should have your bedroom back, he says.”
“Don’t go because of me. We could work on my game.”
He twirls the ball and tosses it above Perro’s dancing. “It’s out of my hands,” he says and throws the ball at her, hard. She isn’t ready for it. It hits her shoulder and bounces off into the brush. Perro follows it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she yells as Dustin dives in behind the dog.
A flock of small birds flushed by the dog and the boy and the ball scatter around her as she turns into the back alley, rubbing her shoulder. She is lifting the latch on the back gate when Dustin catches up.
“Sorry,” he says and she knows he is. He opens his mouth to explain, then closes it again. She waits. “It’s complicated,” he says.
“No kidding.” She opens the gate and follows him and the dog into Isabel’s garden.
Isabel is taking a photograph of Álvaro against the flowering linden tree, the mountain in the background. She calls Janna to stand beside him.
“I will submit to pictures, but only after I clean up.”
Isabel puts down her camera. “Your hair needs cutting anyway,” she tells Álvaro.
Janna groans.
“Yours could use a trim, too.”
“She needs to do this,” Janna tells Álvaro. “There’s no point arguing. There might, however, be a point to prayer.”
Álvaro sits on a chair in the centre of the garden and Perro pants at his feet. Isabel’s fingers trace his scars, rubbing the lumps and knots until the jagged currents settle down and he relaxes. He closes his eyes. Then Isabel is showing Janna how to hold the scissors and she is there on the other side of him. And then Janna is in the chair and Isabel is showing Álvaro how to hold his daughter’s hair in the comb and snip it so the cut ends blend in. Something is being exchanged. A shoulder leaning into a hip, a head pressed against a stomach. The small clumps of hair, receptacles for their DNA, fall to the ground where they mingle with the particles of dirt, of ash, and insect bodies. With flower seeds. As the boxcars crash together in great groans across the road, they relax into the gift of time and attention passing between them.
Dustin stands at the back door, watching. He looks pale and soft in the shadow. Janna calls him and he submits to the scissors. She brushes out the twigs caught in his hair and snips at the wispy curls around his ears. His hair has his father’s red hidden in the brown and it is as fine as her own. Isabel sees the way he leans against her and relaxes under her hands and wishes that she had had more children, that Janna wasn’t the youngest of all the cousins, that she had had, while still a child herself, the feel of a child’s arms around her neck as she carried it, shivering, out of the lake or put it to bed. Álvaro feels the prickle of hair on the collar of his shirt and wishes that he could give the story a happy ending, that Clara could bring Lucía Madriela to have her hair cut in this garden.
When Trevor and Soryada arrive, Isabel takes dozens of pictures. Soryada is big now and her face is pale, a little puffy. They will take Álvaro to the priest’s house in Fraser Lake and then set up their camper down at LeJac, in time for the Rose Prince Pilgrimage. They want to be there for the midnight vigil, to say prayers for Trevor’s father.
“You take care of Soryada,” Isabel tells the men as they drive off.
Lance is in the kitchen packing up food. Dustin is in the living room chatting online to some friends in Terrace. His father’s place is off the grid, he tells Janna. No power, no phone, no Internet.
“Where exactly is it?” Isabel asks.
“You’ve never seen it?” Janna says.
Isabel shakes her head, suddenly shy.
“She sticks pretty close to town,” Lance says and Janna wonders if that’s a criticism. She wants to defend Isabel from something.
“There’s nothing to stop you both from coming with us,” he says.
“Don’t fall for it, Janna,” Dustin calls. “There’s no TV. No phone.”
“No telephones,” Isabel says. “No calls from Trevor’s sisters, no long talks about where to sit all the white folk coming from our side of the family.” The phone rings as she speaks. “It sounds like paradise,” she says, taking the call outside.
“There’s mosquitoes,” Dustin yells.
Janna laughs when she sees the frustration on Lance’s face.
“I’m more of a city girl myself,” she says, shrugging. “Thanks, but…”
“Just for the weekend,” Isabel says, coming back inside. “Blessed peace.”
“You go right ahead,” Janna says, “but not this girl.” And then she finds herself telling Isabel that she, Janna, will babysit Dustin for the weekend so that Isabel can see Lance’s mysterious place in the bush.
“Take the bug dope,” Dustin yells as the truck pulls away.
†
“A boat,” Isabel says as Lance stops the truck beside a dock at the edge of the small lake at the end of a long track that wound in from Jasmine and Frank’s farm through an aspen bush.
He turns to her, assessing the timbre of her surprise. “Yes,” he says. “It was my father’s gillnetter.”
She stares at the wooden planks curving in the sun. Nasturtiums spill over from a pot on the deck and trail almost to the water shivering around the hull. Portable steps lead onboard through a little gap in the railing. She is surprised at the boat, surprised at the lake, surprised at Lance. She never expected this out of someone so practical. Someone who wasted not one movement. He is, she realizes, nervous. For a moment she wishes she were back in her house, alone. Everyone travelling in, but not yet docked.
She follows him on board. He unpacks and stows the food in the small cupboards in the cabin. Then he starts a tiny engine and takes them out to the middle of the lake where all they can see is the green of the trees, reeds, and shrubs lining the shore. He brings out washed vegetables, hooks up a propane tank, and puts water for the pasta on to boil. He asks her to make a salad and passes her a small board, a knife, and a wooden bowl. She tears the lettuce, chops the tomatoes, cucumber, and slivers the carrots. Behind her, he unfolds the bunk into a double bed, puts on sheets, a blanket, and folds it back into a bench. He hops out onto the deck and rigs up a small wind turbine, which is soon whizzing in the light breeze.
And suddenly she’s shaking. She’s on a date. She knew it before, but now her body knows it. She huddles on the bench, trying to stop shaking. To keep him from noticing her nerves. He offers her a glass of soda water but she shakes her head. Her hands are shaking. She doesn’t know if she can swallow anything, but he makes some kind of joke and the feeling passes and they’re eating at the tiny table tucked into one corner.
He tidies up the dishes and leads her out on deck.
“This is where the net used to be,” he tells her, distracting her with stories of his time working summers with his dad off the north coast, until his dad took a buyout. She tells him about her dad, how close they were until her mother died and then he seemed to slide away. And so did she.
“Since his mom and I split, Dustin has been trying to take care of us. To keep something intact.”
“He wants you back together?”
“He doesn’t want strangers in his house.”
Isabel thinks about the way Janna got into Lance’s truck at the airport. His bush supplies in the back — a box of flares and safety equipment, rain
gear and caulk boots, empty sample boxes. The mud dried on the door frame. Her slow walk through the backyard, keeping Perro at bay with her foot. Whose is he? she was asking with her toes. Assuming it was all Lance. Seeing Janna back sitting at the kitchen table made Isabel realize how the years she’d been away were gone. Irretrievable. And the time ahead was going to be different. Even more complicated. She is angry now, at herself. She keeps her nose clean for years and then within days of Janna’s arrival she takes off with some guy.
“It might have been good luck,” Lance says, “not having her dad around. All we ever did when we were together was fight about Dustin and it’s all we’ve done since we’ve separated.”
“Fight?” Isabel is withdrawing. She does not want anything taken for granted.
Lance scoops water out of the lake to water the nasturtiums. “Well, she’d fight. I just get quiet. It seems pointless when you know you can’t win. When you don’t even want to win. You just want to go your own way.”
“I think I need to go back home.”
His hands hover in the air, glistening. “She could have come. Dustin and I could sleep on the deck.”
“You don’t like her,” she says.
He sits back on his heels, one hand brushing the hair away from his face. “I’d expect it for me, but it’s hard to watch her judge you.”
“Janna can judge me all she wants. It’s her way of being with me. She’s trying to improve me. I didn’t raise her to be nice all the time. That’s bullshit.”
“Are we fighting?”
“I guess so. Yes, I guess we are. Maybe I should go.”
“I’ve always liked being on my own,” he says. “I thought maybe that had changed.”
“It’s not you I’m fighting with,” Isabel says. “It’s me. I have to get back.”
He nods. “We’ll go. But the water’s warm,” he tells her, untying the laces on his shoes. “I’d like to swim first. Ten minutes is all. Will you come?”
She shakes her head as he slips off his socks. He tucks them into his shoes and stands to unbutton his shirt. He looks across the small space between them to where she’s leaning against the galley door. He pulls his shirt out of his pants and he is close enough that she can see the goosebumps rise as the cool air touches his bared arms. The sun, low over the aspens, glints on the copper hair. She feels trapped, a strong emotion almost like fear. He turns without a word, strips off his pants and shorts, and dives so quietly he disappears under the surface with scarcely a plop. She shivers in the doorway, holding on as the boat rocks from his departure. She is alone.
She is alone long enough to walk around the boat looking for him to surface. She is alone long enough to wonder about how to start the boat and get back to shore. She is alone long enough to be afraid and to not want to be alone anymore. When his head pops up and his hands reach for the boat, she is relieved. He uses his shirt for a towel and she watches him dry himself. First the face and then the shoulders. Down the arms. And then his chest, the hair springing up as it dries. One leg and another. The muscles in his thighs bunch as he lifts first one foot and then the other to the low railing. Neither of them speaks. The silence builds between them, becomes thick and tangible, strains against her resistance. The sun is setting behind him, and the air is full of cottonwood fluff and insects drifting in a halo around his head. She looks at him and her hands are the ones that finally move through the light and land upon his skin. His heat is already rising through the surface chill, and her hands move over his body to find the warmth. Only when she has made her reconnaissance does he move toward her.
†
“My mom tells me to get used to complications,” Dustin says, sitting with Janna in the movie theatre. She has pulled a toque down low and slumped in the seat because she doesn’t want anyone to recognize her. She dreads the wedding. There will be lots of jokes about Àlvaro and Isabel, lots of giggles and elbows in the ribs. Here there’s no one over seventeen. She pulls off the hat. Dustin is talking about his mother’s boyfriends and Lance’s one girlfriend who dumped him last Christmas.
“It isn’t easy,” he says. “You keep talking if you can. It’s way worse if you don’t. I tried that for a while and you get a little crazy.” He sounds like an old man, exhausted with life’s endless twists and turns. “But you kind of get used to it.”
He stuffs a handful of popcorn into his mouth. The trailers begin and Janna watches the light splash across his face. He’s staring at the pictures without seeing them. His lips are moving and she bends to listen.
“I’m going to have to talk to Lance about it. I mean I can’t tell my mom because she’s really stuck on this guy. And he’s nice enough. It’s just his kids.”
They are mean, he tells her. They’re younger than he is and they seem nice, but they’re mean. They tell their dad lies about him. They could pretty much wreck his life, he says.
Twenty minutes into the movie, Janna realizes it’s a mistake. A group of kids alone in a big house are all turning into monsters except this one little nerd who’s waiting to get axe-murdered. Dustin’s eyes are closed.
“It’s actually worse when you close your eyes,” he says as if he’s just conducted an interesting experiment.
She takes him out of the theatre and they sit against the warm cement wall of Janna’s elementary school. A group of older boys are shooting hoops. He slurps the last of his drink through the ice at the bottom of the cup. The basketball ricochets off the wall and before it hits Janna she jumps up and catches it. The boys cluster at the edge of the court. One laughs and comes toward them. She bounces it a couple of times. Passes it to Dustin. He rises to his feet.
“You’re as good as they are. Go play.”
He looks at the boy holding out his hands for the ball. “Only if you do,” he says and passes it back. She dribbles it toward the boy and passes it back to Dustin, now on the other side. They pass back and forth, approaching the hoop, and the boys don’t clue in until they’ve scored and when the oldest boy checks her a little too hard she stops with the ball in her hands and says don’t and he backs right off and then all they’re doing is playing ball and Dustin isn’t thinking about his mother’s boyfriend’s kids and she isn’t thinking about her mother fucking yet another man.
She sends Dustin upstairs to wash. She wanders through the house, trying to find the old feelings. This was her home. The place she got maddest and the place she carries inside her, like her liver or her appendix. It has changed. The kitchen is tidier and there’s different food on the shelves. Herbal teas. Jars of dried things — mushrooms? Tomatoes? Rice crackers and tahini. The dog’s basket behind the door. A pair of men’s sandals. A bird identification book full of paper scraps.
Upstairs, Dustin rummages behind the closed door of what used to be her room. She drifts up the stairs. In her mother’s room, she sees no sign of shared accommodation. No condoms in the night table drawer. No stains on the sheets of the unmade bed, but a drawstring bag of worry dolls is tucked under the pillow. Janna squeezes Christmas girl in her pocket and laughs. You are part of one goofy family, she says. And you and me, we definitely fit right in around here. She pulls her out to show her the dozens of hangers stuffed into her mother’s big closet: sweaters, blouses, dresses, skirts, scarves draped over a chair, and a pile of shoes on the floor. A chest of drawers pushed into the back corner.
Her grandmother’s dresses, folded neatly with tissue and lavender sachets between the layers. Isabel used to bring them out at every birthday and she and Janna would try them on. She pulls out a white summer frock with a light floral print and a turquoise sash. The cotton is so threadbare, it’s almost transparent. She strips off her T-shirt, tucks Christmas girl into her bra, and pulls the dress over her head. She stretches to do up the buttons in the back. She turns to look in the mirror on her mother’s vanity, the glass warped with age. The girl who looks back at her is a stranger with a haircut she doesn’t really like. The dress is loose and sags around her small br
easts. The sash has a stain at one tip. On the vanity, squashed between a jar of face cream and a bowl of cotton balls, sits her old plush pig, more grey than pink. Its sideways smile infuriates her. She picks up the nail scissors open on the pile of magazines stacked on the floor beside the bed. The tiny blades snip and tear at the fur, revealing a layer of clear pink underneath the years of grime. She sticks the point of the scissors into the fabric and cuts until the stuffing comes out in matted clumps. The pig is in pieces when Dustin, watching from the doorway, asks if she would please give him the scissors.
Why am I so angry, Janna thinks, handing them over.
“It takes some getting used to,” he tells her and asks if she’d like some nachos.
“Maybe they’ll fatten me up enough to fill out this dress,” she says as they stick the heaped plate into the microwave. “So I can wear it to the wedding.”
“It looks very nice,” he says. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Will you be my date?”
“A pleasure,” he says, bowing.
A few shreds of cheese glued to the plate are all that remain when Lance’s truck pulls in. Janna is surprised to find herself pleased. Relieved. Happy, really, to see the look on Isabel’s face when she notices the dress Janna is wearing.
†
Álvaro parks the priest’s car between a big diesel pickup and an old brown station wagon. The vinyl upholstery’s smell fills the air as the car’s black metal gathers all the heat of the engine and the midday sun to pin him into place. A feathery dream catcher dangles from the rear-view mirror. A crucifix is glued to the dashboard.
The mown fields fall away in terraces to the lakeshore below where campers are parked, some pulled into the shade of the big cottonwoods that line the edge of the water, others arranged in circles on the rough grass. Small tents are scattered among them. A long stairway brings pilgrims up to the smoke rising from the cook shacks just below where he sits, the driver’s window cracked open to let in air, flies, and the smell of fry bread. It is like the big powwows he went to when he lived in Winnipeg. The open sky and the rumbling of thunder. The line-up snaking into the dining tent, people hungry for lunch.
The Taste of Ashes Page 30
