The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  Mrs. Fujimoto sets down the teacup with a rattle. She begins to pace the length of the balcony.

  She wants to talk to the foreign woman, to tell her things it will take her months, if not years, to figure out. Where to go to experience the best tea ceremony in the city. (The ceramics museum, not the lotus temple, it’s too crowded and touristy.) How you should never open the door to a man in a cable company uniform. (These “salesmen” have been known to be disguised yakuza.) How to deal with groping men on subway trains. (Embarrass them. Grab their hand, look them in the eye, and say “no.”) The foreign woman won’t stay longer than a year, two at most. They never do. Mrs. Fujimoto feels an urgency to impart these pieces of wisdom before it is too late.

  She continues to pace.

  One Wednesday night, a few months after her father’s death, she perches at the edge of the futon, watching her husband in the mirror as he fumbles with his tie. A small velvet box sits beside her. Outside, a drunken man hollers. She waits for the echo to fade before speaking.

  “Why are you giving me this? It’s not my birthday.”

  His eyes rise to meet hers but dip at the last second, like a wave that cannot gather the strength to crash against the shore. “You deserve something special.”

  She remains still, breathing shallowly. He turns. Their eyes meet, then his sink. He runs a hand through his oily hair. She waits. “I’ve done something,” he says. “With another woman. It was a few times only. I’m very sorry.”

  A cry escapes her throat. She throws the velvet box at him, but it hits the edge of the dressing table and bounces to the tatami. A moan from beyond the papery walls, followed by the thump of someone turning over in sleep. One of the children.

  She forces herself to whisper. “I’ve given you a son and a daughter. I cook, I keep this apartment clean, I don’t question your decisions –”

  “It’s nothing you’ve done.”

  “I buy the best clothing we can afford. I try to make myself …”

  “You are beautiful. But you’re cold. I feel I cannot touch you. In any way.” She squares her shoulders. His voice hardens. “Most of my colleagues have done it at least once. It happens.”

  She places a hand against her mouth, the satin of her robe tickling her chin, mocking. “My father would never have –”

  “Your father was a different type of man. Look where it got him.” She turns away, swallows the bile rising in her throat. After a moment, he picks up the box, creeps across the room, and sits beside her.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you. Will you forgive me?” He holds out the box. “Will you accept this?”

  The topaz bracelet is stark against its white pillow. Four stones. Four people in the apartment. She holds out her hand, and he fastens the bracelet to her wrist.

  Later, she places the bracelet in her lacquered box, where it will be joined by other pieces. Three strands of Mikimoto black pearls, a rhodium watch with a diamond-studded face, an emerald pendant and platinum chain, among others. Each given with the same look of eyes rising and falling, each received with the same wave of bile rising and subsiding.

  The first Wednesday in August, Mrs. Fujimoto realizes that she has run out of the powdered tea. Why didn’t she notice this last week, so that she could have picked some up before now? She cannot be bothered walking to the back-alley tea shop in the stickiness of the afternoon heat. Instead, she takes the mail out to the balcony.

  Two things are about to slice through the stickiness. The first is a brochure from the foreign woman’s school. Bright blue lettering on glossy paper proclaims in Japanese, “Come learn with us at the Edelweiss School. We can teach you to speak English with confidence and ease.” Mrs. Fujimoto’s heart begins to pound as she looks at the smiling faces of the students and the foreign woman. Her name is Cheryl. Cheryl from Philadelphia.

  The second is a flicker from the opposite balcony. Cheryl is standing at the edge, her hand shading her eyes as she gazes in the direction of the temple garden. Her face is slack. She turns and looks directly at Mrs. Fujimoto. They stare at one another. Then Cheryl waves.

  Mrs. Fujimoto feels light and cool, as if she is hovering weightless above the sea. Seconds pass. Her body begins to sag. She tries to raise her arm but it is heavy as a sandbag. A fly lands on her elbow. She does not have the strength to shoo it away. Cheryl’s arm slowly drops. Mrs. Fujimoto is pulled under by the sea.

  A minute later, she resurfaces, and by the time she reaches land she has made a list of twenty things she must buy for Obon. With only days to go, she can complete the preparations, but not to her satisfaction. She has wasted too much time.

  STEVEN BENSTEAD

  MEGAN’S BUS

  I said to Adele when we had a quiet moment together, I told her, “Reggie Thompson and his wife – Nancy.” I smiled at the casual way I tossed off the woman’s name. Just thinking about her filled me with a thousand contradictions. I had not met her before, but I was not likely to forget her. She was a practical one, cool, all common sense, cut and dried. “They came by the shop today. With their little girl. Sophie.”

  Reggie I knew from the shop. He had been a good customer, ever since he and his family had moved into the neighbourhood a few years ago. I had a Petro-Can on the corner of Nathaniel and Grant. Gas pumps and two bays offering complete Certigard Service. We’d chat briefly when he came in for gas – longer when he brought the car in for maintenance. Now he stopped by almost every day. We would compare notes, repeat stories we’d heard, share bits of news, scraps of gossip.

  It wasn’t as if I had any business to do. We would lean elbows on our respective sides of the counter and visit over a cup of coffee. I used to keep a fresh pot constantly on the go for my customers, when I had customers. But my coffee supply was not going to last forever, and when the day came to tell him I only had enough for one more pot, he misunderstood. His face went white. “You’re not pulling out too, Frank,” he stared, his eyes filled with fear, “are you?” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Where you gonna go? What you gonna do?”

  Half the houses on Reggie’s street were empty, mine the same. People packing up. The lucky ones had carts or wheelbarrows, the rest simply walked out with what they could carry. Seeing me – me and Adele and our two kids (Megan was eight, Joel was almost seventeen) – seeing us go, another family, might have shaken his resolve.

  “There’s nothing out there,” he insisted. “Nothing. Those rumours about the camps? That’s all they are, rumours. People are dying out there, Frank, getting preyed upon. You’d be a fool …”

  By this time I was laughing, and Reggie realized he had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  Not so long ago if I needed more coffee – or anything: automobile parts, oil – all I had to do was pick up the phone. I had deliveries every day all day.

  Used to have a tanker truck deliver gasoline too, regular as clockwork. I had managed to salvage half a dozen jerry cans of gas from my storage tanks using a hand pump. The level was so low by then the retail pumps were sucking fumes. But I got broken into early on. Someone jimmied the back door, wiped me out, took the gas, my last two cases of oil, all my filters, spark plugs. But they didn’t get the sugar. Reggie and I drank our coffee black, and I had taken the box of sugar packs home to Adele a few days earlier. The thieves would have made off with that, I’m sure of it, lickety-split. A practical bunch, I took them for, serious scavengers, the holy-roller types that were coming out of the woodwork, because they didn’t take the coffee that was sitting in plain sight, coffee being just coffee after all, with no real value to it except to keep you awake at night.

  Running out of it proved to be something of a moot point, however. Not long after Reggie and I drank our last cup, the power went off and stayed off.

  By then Joel had us storing water at the house in every possible container we could find. And collecting firewood (we were lucky enough to have a fireplace) and candles and batteries. I went along with his precautions, but he pursued them
more earnestly than I did. He seemed to think the idea that things would eventually return to normal not worth considering, whereas I held out hope that they might.

  For me, normal meant going into the shop every day, if only for a few hours. I hung on to what was left of that routine, I clung to it. It was my way back. Chatting with Reggie over the counter, and anyone else who might pop in. Sometimes I found myself listening for the sound of a train – the CN mainline was only a few blocks away – or gazing down the street hoping to see a Hydro repair truck working to get the power back on. There hadn’t been anything in the sky since the helicopters stopped flying. Where they went nobody seemed to know. Sometimes I even hoped for a convoy of army trucks to go by, but I never said as much, not even to Reggie. Because for one thing, if the army had to take over we were in really bad shape. For another, I was afraid he’d tell me to quit dreaming: there was no army, there was nothing, we were on our own.

  But we were not by ourselves. At dusk you could see the bonfires burning on the bridges that led into the downtown, lines of demarcation tended by pockets of men, women, and children, the ones who had gathered in the city’s core at the start of all this. They were as desperate as we were, but maybe more organized than we were. Everyone I talked to suspected that a growing band of warlords was recruiting the gangs from these dispossessed souls, dispatching groups of young men to roam our neighbourhoods nightly in search of abandoned houses to loot. I worried about a time when we might find those fires burning at the end of our street, and what that might mean.

  Almost from the start, Adele had not let Megan go out to play without one of us being with her. Her friends were gone, left when their parents pulled out. A more ominous reason had to do with the rumours about kids being abducted, snatched right out of their own front yards – by the gangs, we all presumed, but maybe not. The idea that someone might appear suddenly in broad daylight and run away with a child seemed alarmingly possible. What they did with these children was what worried me. No one, not Adele, not Reggie, seemed to want to talk about that. Reggie’s scoffing, “What do you think?” came as close to confirming my worst fears without defining them.

  Food was an issue. A drought the year before had left little local produce. In the spring, the rains had been welcomed at first, but then the rain never stopped long enough for the farmers to get a crop in, and those who did were hit by a severe frost in June. Then twenty centimetres of snow fell in July, the skies turned grey, and the snow did not melt completely until August, when the weather turned unusually hot, forty degrees for days on end, if I was to believe my thermometer at the shop. By then the grocery stores were cleaned out. People had started walking in and taking what they could, me among them, and nobody tried to stop us. TV was off the air, we hadn’t seen a newspaper in weeks, but we heard sporadic reports on the radio – Joel searching the dial for a broadcast, any broadcast, sometimes we didn’t even know what city it was coming from – of people fighting over a can of beans, for instance, an apple. In the more disturbing of these broadcasts, you could hear gunfire in the background and people screaming.

  Then the power went off. We had a wind-up radio so we didn’t have to waste our batteries, but after that, Joel couldn’t raise a signal on any band no matter how slowly he searched the dial.

  And without power, of course, our freezer went, and we had to eat up whatever perishables we had left – the pound of hamburger, the half a package of fish sticks, our one chicken – before they spoiled. A brief, unwanted feast to no good purpose.

  Reggie and I were still drinking coffee, which meant we still had power, when I started taking Megan to the shop. Adele realized she couldn’t keep the girl cooped up all the time. She was eight years old, she needed to run and play, at least a little. The shop was only a twenty-minute walk from the house. I thought the risk worth taking, for Megan’s sake. In fact, the risk seemed very low. I had never felt threatened on my way there or back. I had not been confronted by anyone, and certainly not by the mythical gangs of roaming young men.

  Megan played in the service bays or out front where I could keep an eye on her. Her favourite game seemed to be something she called “bus driver,” in which she drove an imaginary bus around the lot, picking up and dropping off imaginary passengers. Upon one occasion, I noticed she had come to a stop at the edge of her route between the gas pumps and the air hose. She remained fixed to the spot, and I grew concerned that she had seen something down the road, something unusual enough to rivet her attention for what had become a considerable amount of time. Reggie had his back to her and was going on about a rumoured shipment of corn coming up from Mexico, though how it was going to get here was anybody’s guess. I excused myself.

  Reggie’s voice trailed off as I hurried away. “What’s up, Frank?” he said, suddenly nervous.

  I shared his concern. “Megan? Honey?” I stood beside her. I looked where she was looking and saw nothing but the empty street winding up toward the railroad tracks.

  “We have to wait,” she explained.

  I nodded as if I understood. Then, “What for?”

  “The train,” she said. “It’s a long one.” Though she had no watch, she looked at her wrist as if to check the time. She peered to her right and craned her neck. Drawn by her gesture I peered in sympathy, looking for the end of the train. For a brief moment I was with her, standing at the front of her bus, an enquiring passenger anxious to get home or to work, watching a whole string of freight cars trundle by. I could’ve sworn I heard them creak and groan. I even glanced the other way and saw the thin plumes of exhaust making the air shimmer as the engines disappeared down the line.

  And then with a word from Megan – “Here we go.” – the train had passed, the warning bells had stopped, the barrier arms came up, and we were on our way. She let me off at the next stop, and as I turned back to the office, I felt an odd surge of happiness. I was almost surprised to see Reggie standing in the doorway, his face grim, his eyes on Megan.

  “Everything okay?” he said before he realized it was. His face relaxed; he offered a smile.

  I shrugged, “Kids,” as if that explained everything, and maybe it went a long way toward doing just that. They didn’t see the world the way we did. “You’ve got a daughter, doncha, Reggie?” Back inside the office, I refilled our cups. “I recall you saying. What’s her name again? Sophie? You should bring her next time. She and Megan could play together. They’d be good company for each other. They’re about the same age, aren’t they?”

  “About,” Reggie conceded, but he was reluctant to pursue the subject.

  He could have had a hundred reasons not to want to bring her along on his daily trek, and I didn’t press him. “I’m only saying,” and left it at that.

  But we had fallen into a bit of a funk, which only deepened when he said, “We are the blind leading the blind, Frank. We are the blind leading the blind.” Then he tapped the counter, “Better get going,” and he abruptly left.

  “See you tomorrow,” I called after him, something I didn’t normally do.

  He waved, but I only saw his back and in that there was no promise.

  He did not, in fact, return the next day, but he did stop by the day after, when we pretty much found ourselves back to normal. I didn’t mention Sophie, and neither did he – not until several weeks later, long after the power had gone out. To me it seemed as if he had chosen to talk about her out of the blue. “Would you like to meet her?” He stood with his head back and his chest out in a formal gesture of pride that was undercut by a stiff smile and the uncertainty in his eyes, as if I might say no.

  I clapped him on the back. “Of course, of course. Bring her around. Anytime.”

  He brought her the next day, he and his wife, Nancy. They were waiting for us outside the shop. Reggie did the introductions and then stepped back, out of fear, I couldn’t help thinking, out of shame. He let his wife do the talking. I was hoping the girls might run off and play together, and although Megan looke
d on with some interest, Sophie seemed to know that was not why she was here, and so I scooted Megan into the service bays to play on her own.

  It was the middle of October. In the morning the windows were rimed with frost. To save on firewood, we had started gathering in the living room and sleeping in our sleeping bags. And we had been rationing our food, of course, for a long time, and growing gaunt in the process, taking in a morsel of anxiety with each mouthful we consumed. The shelves of every grocery store, in as wide a radius as we dared to make, were empty, though we continued to search in hopes of finding something, anything. Scavenging had become part of our routine. Joel and I took turns, one of us going out and one of us staying home. A man, we reasoned, we hoped, at least for the time being, was almost as good as a dog at keeping intruders away. And we didn’t have a dog. No one did. They either ran wild in packs or their bones had been picked clean.

  By then I was opening the shop just long enough to give Reggie a chance to drop in, and long enough to let Megan drive her bus. She usually had the same route, though sometimes there were detours, she explained to me, due to road-work or a parade. It was a tough job being a bus driver, making her way through all that traffic, but she soldiered on for the sake of her passengers. She took great delight in having a full bus, calling out, “Move to the back, please,” when all the seats were taken and the aisle was crowded. When I boarded her bus and dropped my imaginary ticket in the fare box, she did her best to treat me as if I were any other passenger, regular or otherwise. She took her driving seriously, waiting for the traffic lights, checking her mirrors as we pulled away.

  Sometimes I would be waiting on her route, other times I would be a few seconds late and have to flag her down. I invariably stood at the front of the bus hanging onto the pole and we would chat about the world through which we made our way. She told me all sorts of stories about her regular passengers. There was Martha who worked at the Tim Hortons, there was Sam who worked at the airport, there was Mrs. Jones who went downtown every Wednesday to get her hair done, and on like that. I didn’t know where they came from, all these people and names, all these stories. When I got off that bus and watched her pull away, the desolation in which I found myself – the abandoned houses, the stores with their windows broken, the empty streets – seemed, if only for a little while, the illusion, and not the other way round.