Every Day We Disappear

by Angela Long

  The worst was over. The moment I describe every time someone finds out I’ve met my birth mother. “What was it like the first time you saw one another?” they inevitably ask. And I tell them. Sort of.

  Pat gripped her door handle as Jimmy drove to the Motel 76 along the Interstate, where we waited out the darkness to drive into the mountains at first light.

  I don’t tell anyone how it all became pretty normal after that. We got ice from the ice dispenser and Dr. Pepper from the vending machine. Jimmy propped himself up against the pillows and flicked through television channels until he found a football game. Lee jumped up beside him.

  Pat and I peeked out at one another from beneath our turtle shells, still waiting for the right moment. We sipped Dr. Pepper while sitting on top of the blankets of the other bed. I pretended I liked football. When the lights went out and Jimmy began to snore, I stared up at the ceiling. Pat kept shifting on her side of the bed; she was awake too. I was more nervous than I’d been on any first date. Much more.

  “You know,” Pat whispered, “I’ve thought about you every day for twenty-three years.” She turned towards me. “Every single day.”

  I turned towards her too. And we stayed like that, silent, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. Waiting to see a familiar face.

  “It’s in your blood,” she whispered. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “What’s in my blood?”

  “The gypsy spirit. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I have the same eyes as you.” And I did. It was eerie to be staring into my own face. Eerie yet comforting at the same time.

  “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised. “I’ll tell you where you’re from.”

  Entering the Cavern

  Our four-person crew – Rob, Dale, Michel and I – entered the emerald twilight. The heady scent of conifers filled the air. Here, in the shelter of the trees, the rain stopped pouring, the wind stopped howling. Occasional droplets fell from strands of moss and plonked on the forest floor. The trees were so tall, we could barely perceive the lashing of their crowns in the wind. Early morning light flickered like votive candles through the canopy of yellow cedar, western hemlock and Douglas fir. We had come here, to the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island in February of 1996, to pan for gold, but instead we’d been offered a job searching for caves.

  Rob, our boss, unfurled a topographical map. We planned our route. He pulled out his plot cord and positioned us a hundred metres apart in a search line. We were armed with compasses, whistles, and waterproof notebooks. Michel kissed my cheek, and walked to his position. In four hours, we’d meet for lunch. He gracefully scissor-jumped a rotting log. He turned and looked at me one last time, as he did each time we parted, and waved.

  Trees as wide as two people spread-eagled hid us from each other’s view. My compass had been wonky lately, so I was positioned inside, rather than on an outer edge, in case I got lost. Getting lost was easy to do. Thousands of years of design were at work here to attain such a seamless uniformity. Colour palettes blended together subtly. Great swaths of earth-toned mosses draped across the bones of the forest.

  I should have felt nervous in a forest that few but the original Indigenous inhabitants had explored. But I didn’t. As instinctively as the salmon returned every year to spawn, I’d been migrating from foreign travels and Montréal to the bush of British Columbia every spring for five years, since the twentieth birthday I’d spent in a tree planting camp north of Prince George. I felt more at home here than anywhere else.

  It was comforting to know, however, that every fifteen minutes, the furthest left in line would call “Cuckoo!” Each of us, in turn, would call back. This foolproof system, we’d convinced ourselves, ensured that we walked at the same speed and wouldn’t surprise any bears. Bears didn’t like surprises.

  Our whistles were reserved for a higher purpose – three short blows would herald the discovery of what we’d all been praying for: a cave system deserving conservation. Such a discovery would ensure that this stand of old growth wouldn’t become what we’d driven through for two hours to arrive here: a clear-cut.

  “Cuckoo!” Rob called. We responded and began to walk.

  I was looking for cave clues: sinkholes, springs, dry valleys, rock bridges. Mainly, I was listening for the sound of running water, for subterranean flow – major sunken watercourses that flowed underground connecting cave systems. I squeezed between walls of grooved bark. I climbed hillocks and crossed streams. I recorded anything of promise. Rob was convinced we were going to hit it big today. We’d been searching for days and had yet to blow the whistle that would announce a find.

  We’d called three sets of cuckoos, but I hadn’t recorded anything about caves. Fiddleheads were ready for picking. Thickets of waxy salal leaves promised good berries. I felt distracted. I kept thinking of Michel’s face as he’d waved to me. I’d wanted to call out to him, to lie down together on a spongy bed of moss and forget about the world encroaching upon us from beyond the forest line. Our contract here would end next week, and our future remained uncertain.

  I was descending a slight slope. A clearing as wide as a two-way bike path ribboned down into a valley – an elk highway, something I’d heard of, but never seen. I noted bear scat. A cluster of primrose. I checked my compass. I followed the path for a few degrees. I felt as though I was walking in the ancient Babylon of forests. Antiquity curled from the boughs in wisps of mist.

  It had been a while since I’d heard the crew. “Cuckoo!” I called. Silence. I called again. I moved a few steps south, a few north. The needle on my compass remained still. I did as I’d been trained and found a comfortable spot, sat down, and waited.

  But something was watching me. I gripped my whistle, frightened until I recalled that bears could smell fear. I tried to calm down, and breathed deeply. I closed my eyes and inhaled a silence rarer in today’s world than any cave system.

  This morning at breakfast Dale had said, “It ain’t sane to live anywhere you can’t piss off the front porch.” With a jolt, I realized that he was right. Michel wanted to return to Montréal, the true love of his life. It wasn’t only my compass that was in need of calibration; I needed to take a new inner bearing to discover my own set of coordinates. I’d followed Michel through every possible angle of three hundred and sixty degrees since we’d first met. It was time to stop. I was more frightened of losing myself in his city than in this wilderness.

  I heard a faint call coming from the east. Soon my crew appeared. Michel told me I looked scared. And I was. I had to make a choice.

  “You’re in a valley,” Rob said, “We couldn’t hear you.” He looked towards the valley floor and decided to change route. We positioned ourselves closer together this time. I tried to snatch glimpses of Michel in the gaps between trees, but could only hear his presence: the crack of branches, his silly variations of “Cuckoo!” Usually, these made me laugh. Usually, I tried to be just as funny. Now, my call was just loud enough for the sound to carry and echo back, hollow-sounding. I walked quickly. I saw a patch of horsetail. A moss-lined spring.

  After about an hour, I heard it – the muffled sound of rushing water. I felt the vibration underfoot, and followed the sound of the invisible river. I climbed a rock face covered in hanging ferns and lichens, and found it on the other side – a limestone archway as wide as a truck. I stood there, looking into the darkness for a few moments, before I blew the whistle.

  2546 West Third

  Thirty-three years old. Single. Childless. In the past five years I’d slept with a tango teacher, carpenter, guitarist, elementary school teacher, forestry student, architect, cook, urban planner, radio announcer, Trinity College scholar. I’d been employed as a gardener, hotel receptionist, maid, waitress, pottery teacher, cook, piano teacher, busboy, olive picker, hostel manager. I’d called my father from payphones in Kingston,
Heraklion, Lisbon. “I’m stuck,” I’d said each time.

  2546 West Third was the house with a headless black plastic mannequin on the porch. It was a bedsit; nine tenants shared three bathrooms and no one vacuumed the tatty carpet leading up the creaky stairs to my room in the southwest corner. We all had our own kitchenettes, formerly the closets of the family that had lived in this beachside Vancouver neighbourhood in the early 1900s.

  The walls were thin. The pipes old. The whole place stunk of cat urine and damp plaster. I burned a lot of Nag Champa. But the rent was cheap and the lease was month-to-month, and it was close to the university. A year ago I’d decided it was finally time to go to university.

  I’d been getting tired. Tired of the kinds of jobs that made my back ache. And I’d been feeling embarrassed every time someone asked me what I did and I answered: I’m a waitress. A maid. A gardener. A dishwasher. It was becoming as difficult as the “Where are you from?” question. Passports made it sound so simple. Angela from Canada. Angela from Oshawa. Angela conceived in an olive grove in Italy.

  Or so I liked to imagine. Pat never actually told me where I’d been conceived during the hours we spent sitting at her kitchen table while she smoked unfiltered Camels and drank coffee.

  “Your father convinced me to meet him in London and travel throughout Europe in a VW van with two farmers from Saskatchewan,” she said. “It was like the Odyssey.”

  “Why?”

  “We were so broke. We ended up stuck on the island of Sardinia, camped in a swamp with the oxen. We walked the entire length of the island, stealing oranges from people’s trees for food.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Your father’s a writer too, you know. Or he was going to write, something to do with rabbits, a social commentary of sorts.”

  “I’m not a writer.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Have you ever been to Guatemala?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. Can you still rent a hammock in Tikal?”

  “Yes.”

  Turned out we’ve been to most of the same places, at nearly the same age.

  “And I bet you’ve been up north in B.C., to the Queen Charlotte Islands.”

  “No, I haven’t.” But Michel had been. Planting. Two of our friends had named their daughter Tlell after a place on the archipelago they’d fallen in love with.

  “You’ll go there someday.”

  “I really want to go to India,” I said.

  Pat sipped her black coffee. “That’s not a place for the faint of heart.”

  The last time I saw Pat, she’d driven from her parents’ house in Ottawa to where I’d been living with Michel in Montréal. She’d never liked him, even after he’d ridden his mountain bike from Nelson, B.C. to her home in Arizona to beg my forgiveness after his affair with a tree planting cook. Once Pat sent me a letter containing two words: Leave him.

  But how could I? I defended his behaviour: He’d grown up with a schizophrenic mother who had been admitted so often to the psychiatric hospital his family had lost count. “Viens ici, mon ange. Bénis-moi. Protèges-moi,” she’d say when we’d visit. I’d look toward Michel. He’d nod. I’d touch her. She’d seize my hand and squeeze. “Promise you love me, angel. Promise.”

  “I promise,” I’d say, but she wouldn’t let go. She’d pull me so close I could smell her fishy breath, see her skin – so sallow and pocked, such oversized pores. One of her eyes wandered, always looking sideways, towards the maple trees outside the window.

  I thought of his mother in the kitchen of the three-bedroom apartment where his six-person family had grown up close to a highway overpass in Montréal, its curtains stained yellow from cigarette smoke. She had just knit me a pair of mittens – thumbs misshapen, cuffs already beginning to unravel. She’d been taking her medication. Her stomach was bloated, her hair falling out. But she could talk. She told me a story of a village outside Trois-Rivières: a house with nine children, a widowed mother who goes to the priest and asks for help, a priest who replies, “Send me your eldest daughter and we’ll see what we can do.” Her hand shook in mine.

  I loved Michel. Simply and completely. I could no more imagine living without him than without my right arm.

  Besides, he had always come through – once all was said and done. He was a master of the grand gesture. He’d flown across continents to ask me back after he’d called it quits. He’d woven me willow baskets in the shape of a cornucopia. He’d written “I love you” a thousand times in microscopic script on a piece of bristol board.

  Now Pat stood at the door of our apartment on rue de Bordeaux – coincidentally, a block away from where my biological grandparents had lived for fifteen years when they first got married. “I’ll probably never be able to do this again,” she said as she gave me an envelope filled with ten crisp hundred-dollar bills. “Leave him.”

  The Phone Call

  The phone on my bedside table rang. Isabelle told me Michel’s father was dead. At first I thought she said his father was in love. My French was already getting rusty. Amour. Mort. Not much of a difference really.

  “Just thought you’d want to know,” she said.

  Isabelle and I were still friends even though Michel and I had split in 1998. I looked at the rowan tree outside, the bright orange of its berries.

  “Would you mind giving me his new phone number?” I asked. She hesitated. Funny how she had become the guardian of his privacy. An old high school friend he saw once or twice a year now, on St-Jean-Baptiste Day or at a thirtieth birthday party. I’d been Michel’s girlfriend for nearly seven years. I’d hitched with him from the border of the Yukon to the border of Mexico, cycled from Arizona’s White Mountains to the golden gates of San Francisco, cycled from Nelson, B.C. to El Paso, Texas. We’d driven across Canada twice. Planted trees for six seasons. Together we’d panned for gold, searched for caves, picked salal leaves, picked raspberries, taught English, volunteered at soup kitchens, worked as camp counsellors and telemarketers.

  “Careful of that gang,” my father had warned when he’d realized things with Michel were serious. It was the time of the Referendum when the Québécois were asked to decide whether or not to separate from the rest of Canada. “They’re probably a bunch of separatists.” And they were. They hung blue and white flags emblazoned with fleurs-de-lys from the balconies of their third-floor apartments in the Plateau. They wore T-shirts that said “Oui!” and drank beers with apocalyptic names like La Fin du Monde and Maudite.

  They rolled enormous cone-shaped spliffs filled with dope and tobacco – un bat – and sat on splintery hardwood floors, playing songs of revolution on the guitar. Their favourites were by a singer named Shawn Phillips, a Texan. They knew all his lyrics by heart and could even sing with the same southern twang. It didn’t matter whether or not they understood the words; they understood the sound of passion.

  I didn’t tell them my parents were part of the “No!” crowd. My mother wanted to ride the “Unity Bus” to Place du Canada and chant, “My Canada Includes Quebec!”

  The separatists accepted me. Kissed me on both cheeks. Fed me tourtière and tarte au sucre. Offered me homemade cherry brandy and porto flips, their grandmothers’ recipes from France. They accepted me because I was Michel’s girlfriend, because I made a half-assed effort to speak French, because I was of Irish ethnicity.

  “It’s in your blood to hate the English too,” they’d say, passing me un bat.

  “But most of the English in Canada aren’t even English,” I’d say, passing le bat to someone else, too nervous to take a drag. “Maybe they speak English but their ancestors could be from Poland, Italy. They don’t have a drop of English blood in them.”

  Michel would coo, “Mon beau petit chou.” My beautiful little cabbage. Then he’d squeeze my thigh, the rest of the gang too stoned to understand my muddled French. But Isabelle would nod intently, a
cting as though I were completely bilingual. Iza and I became fast friends.

  I held the receiver to my ear. Iza was still silent. We usually tried to avoid the topic of Michel in the interest of preserving our friendship. “Did he tell you not to give me his number?” I snapped. “His father just died, Iza.”

  Iza sighed. Even her sigh sounded French. Sexy. She was one of those French women who managed to look fabulously stylish even at minus twenty, whose nose never seemed to go red. She shimmered like a string of Christmas lights against a monochrome sky while I plodded along in sensible boots, wool, and Gore-Tex, blending in with every drab cloud.

  Maybe she was sleeping with Michel now. Why not? Maybe she’d had a secret crush on him since the high school years, the guy with electric blue eyes and thick mane of curly black hair who was always forgetting something – a pen, his textbook. Tapping her on the shoulder. Sprawling his lanky legs in the aisle.

  I could hear Iza take a pull of a joint. She exhaled. “Don’t tell him I gave it to you.”

  I looked at the number on the piece of paper. I held it to my chest. Don’t think about it too much. Just call, it’s no big deal. If you make it a big deal, it’ll be a big deal. Just call. But it was getting late. There was a time difference. And it was Saturday night. Did I want him thinking I was home alone on a Saturday night? I put the paper beneath my pillow and went to bed.

  ~

  That was the year my father began to lose his memory. Sometimes he’d ask, “Where’s Michel?” I said I didn’t know. But I knew everything. He had a website. He lived just blocks away from our old place in the Plateau-Mont-Royal. He had a pottery studio and gave lessons. The past threw espresso cups and bols à café on YouTube. I could look at Michel’s hands, those same hands. I thought his short hair suited him.