Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “My father is still gone.”

  “No, Bridget. He’s alive in a thought you’re having, and I’m having that thought too. The thing in your hand, that you held. There are some things you can bring back to life.”

  She backed away even farther. “She won’t know where I am . . .”

  “Go then,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have faith in me. I doubt I even brought that pipe home. I probably tossed it back into the dirt. Because that’s the kind of person I am. Right?”

  “I don’t know, Bridget. I never thought so.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “Not yet.”

  She turned away from him and began to walk to the lights. She stopped at the crosswalk and looked back at him but said nothing. He stood with his hands at his sides and this seemed to tell her something, and she crossed at the light and continued toward the hotel.

  THREE

  HE WANTED TO have pictures with him. The one taken with his cousins at a baseball game, a couple from the fridge: Bailey as an apricot blur in the snow, running insanely in a circle; the famous summer picture of Alison and Bridget’s bare feet in the sand, toenails painted twenty different colors.

  There was a framed photo over the fireplace of Bridget with David, taken in the springtime of his death. When he thought of David, John always imagined him with more flesh on his face, but this picture corrected that memory. The dead are always first recalled as their healthy selves, and after they’re gone the photographic evidence of death on their faces shocks. In this picture — which Bridget cherished — David’s eyes retreated into his face, and brown blotches marked his cheeks. His skull looked as if it had shifted under his skin. John knew that David had not killed himself out of shame — Marianne had always been wrong about this. But John had never known why he had chosen that day in particular. Now he realized that any morning in David’s last month would have provided its reason through a glimpse in the mirror. They’d always wondered what he was thinking, and now it seemed clear to John that he was thinking, I’m already gone.

  He pushed out the back of the frame and cradled the glass in his hand, carefully separated it from the picture. He put the empty frame in a drawer and slipped the photo into a book with the others. He filled a single suitcase with his things and brought it down the stairs. The cab came five minutes later and John got in and gave the driver Howard’s address.

  IN THE HOTEL, Bridget had chased a single reporter out of the hallway and then locked herself and her mother in the room. They ordered hamburgers from room service and stood in silence at the windows, eating. An hour later, at three o’clock, a second vehicle entered the site and unloaded what looked like an oversized lawn mower, and a man wearing earphones began moving it over the earth. It had begun to snow and the brown cloddish earth looked like a cake dusted with sugar. The mower operator started near the exposed wood and moved in a long spiral along and out from it. They saw Jarvis and one of his assistants standing in the background with their arms crossed against the wind, while a third man came out of the lab every two or three minutes to shout something to the mower, who would then move a few feet in some direction and lower the head of the machine again.

  There was a knock at the door, and on her mother’s nod Bridget went to the eyehole. “Is it John?” said Marianne.

  “No. I think it’s a reporter.”

  “It is a reporter” came a man’s voice from behind the door. “The Globe. I know you don’t hate sports, Mrs. Hollis. That’s not my angle.”

  “What is your ‘angle’?” said Bridget through the door.

  “Can I come in? I’ll leave if you tell me to.”

  Bridget opened the door and a man passed her a business card. It read RICHARD LOWINGER, CITY DESK. Bridget handed the card to her mother.

  “What do you want, Mr. Lowinger?” Marianne said.

  “I just want to ask a couple of questions, if that’s okay.”

  “What’s your foregone conclusion? I’d like to know that first.”

  Lowinger raised his eyebrows at her and then started when Bridget shut the door behind him. “I don’t have one,” he said. “But I’m interested in your husband’s work. I covered his Simcoe dig in ‘82. He wrote me a note to thank me.”

  “Fine,” said Marianne.

  Bridget passed him to stand with her mother. “I thought it was 1981.”

  “’Eighty-one, then.” He went over to the window and looked out.

  “They’re using sonar or something like that,” said Marianne.

  The sounder was focusing on an area closer to the white lab truck. They moved the truck back twenty feet, to the edge of the site. The area they were examining was now about fifteen feet south of the rib and thirty feet east of it. “Jarvis was right about the drop-off, I think.”

  “Can you explain?” said Lowinger. Bridget told him what she’d told John. “So this thing could still be somewhere out in the lake?”

  “They don’t know,” she said. “The point Mr. Jarvis was making was that if it broke apart on a shallow grade, it would all still be in one place. And if it’s not all in one place, pieces of it could be anywhere, under any of the buildings down here.”

  The reporter turned to Marianne. “Do you really believe there’s a boat down there?”

  “Are you interested in the boat, or my husband? And his ‘struggle,’ as you’ll probably want to put it.”

  “Both,” Lowinger said. “There isn’t one without the other.”

  “Why don’t I dig up my husband for you then? Since they’re taking care of the boat.”

  Lowinger tried to take the comment in stride and failed, coughing into his hand. Marianne went to sit on the edge of the bed. She waited for Lowinger to draw up a chair, and placed herself face-to-face with the man. He was David’s age — her age. Yet another man sitting in front of her with an instinct. When she noticed Lowinger had not leaned away from her but was patiently waiting, she began. “Three years ago, my husband, David, had a twitch in his hand that wouldn’t go away.”

  Bridget stood in the window, listening to her mother and watching the progress below. It began to snow. For a while, she sat with them and added her own observations to her mother’s, but she returned to the window, impatient for the workers below to finish. An hour after that, she watched the ministry team load the sounder back into its truck and leave the site. Marianne handed Lowinger a photo from her desk, and he tucked it into his notebook. “Is there anything else you want to add?” he asked her, and she said no. He got up from the chair to ask Bridget, but she was already heading to the door.

  “We’ll have to continue this later,” she said. “They’re done.”

  IN THE LAB truck, one of the computer operators showed the results of the sounding. Its readings revolved onto the screen like a radar map, an underground X-ray. They recognized the long, thin rib, which tapered and broke off about eight feet south of where it had surfaced, turning from red to orange in the program’s chromatic language of depth. Around it, in sweeping circles, were bits of material: inorganic objects originally in the landfill and displaying in all colors, and some that were identified as part of the boat. These retreated in a pattern from the wooden rib, fading to a greeny yellow.

  The sounder had sniffed along in larger circles, and then caught the beginning of a longer shape in dark green, about thirty feet from the protruding wood. The sweeping became ellipsoidal, and the shape extended, deepening as well, dark green to violet: the far boundary of the machine’s vision. Marianne muttered an awestruck sound as the lost boat ghosted into view. “What is it?” said Bridget.

  “Lake steamer,” said Dr. Jarvis. “No later than 1870.”

  “So it could be from the 1850s?”

  “It could be.”

  A breath-held silence enveloped them all as a ship’s deck, shimmering like tropical water, expanded on the screen. Compartments belowdecks were barely visible, skimming under the solid wood as much darker shapes,
their bearing walls appearing as a purple-streaked black. There were six of them in the truck, crowded around the fourteen-inch screen. “You getting this?” Marianne said to Lowinger. The man was writing furiously.

  Finally, a heavy rectangular object hove into view, back under the decking. “That’s it,” Marianne said.

  “Screwhouse,” said Jarvis. He sounded depressed.

  “No, that must be stowage. Christ,” she said in quiet wonder. “Is that the front or the back of the boat?”

  “We’re waiting for someone to bring in a schematic,” said the doctor. “They haven’t built one of these things in a few years. It must be the screwhouse. These steamers had gearboxes the size of a garage.”

  “If it’s the back of the boat, it could have been stowage,” Marianne said. The operator had frozen the screen. “They would have centered it so it didn’t skew the boat right or left, and kept it at the back to keep her stern low.”

  The doctor didn’t seem concerned one way or the other. “In any case, it’s academic.”

  Now it was the reporter who spoke up. “The ministry will abandon the dig because what they’re hunting for is twenty feet down?”

  “Twenty-six,” Jarvis said.

  “The Union Arena people can get down there in two hours,” said Lowinger. “Look at the shit they have over there just waiting to be pressed into service. Get the minister to appropriate one of those big earthmovers and let them dig. There’s nothing ‘academic’ about it.”

  “You’re right,” said the doctor, “they could be down there by morning. But that’s not why it’s academic.”

  AN HOUR BEFORE this, John was stacking his things in Howard’s spare room. He locked the door behind him and began walking south toward the hotel. Snow was coming down in drifting clumps, a damp and sticky cold. As he walked, Marianne was sitting on the hotel room bed, talking to Richard Lowinger, and Bridget was at the window, watching the sounder on the site below.

  “We met in 1964,” Marianne was saying. “I’d moved from Montreal with my parents and I was enrolled in English at the Scarborough Campus of U of T. The school had just opened and it was like having a university in a forest. David was teaching there — geology, although he’d trained as a lawyer — and he held his classes outside, poking around the bases of trees. How a man who didn’t know a drumlin from a sand dune ended up teaching Introduction to Landforms, I don’t know.

  “There wasn’t as much of a taboo around asking out a student then. I suppose nothing like it could happen these days, and I guess I understand. Except sometimes the person you’re going to love comes from somewhere unexpected and you don’t really have much say in the matter. We got married the same year we met.”

  “She was pregnant with me,” said Bridget. “She was a bad girl.”

  The reporter didn’t write this down. Marianne continued.

  “David was at the university until his death. He brought them a lot of fame, but before he died they turned their backs on him. All because of this.”

  “Why?”

  She was silent a moment, thinking. “He thought modern people were the loneliest people in the history of the world. And the thought that another time was under the one we live in was moving to him. Because it’s a kind of company for us, all of us marooned here in the present.”

  “There are a couple of boarded-up houses on Elm Street, just near Bay,” said Bridget. She came over and sat on the bed beside her mother. Marianne covered her daughter’s hand with her own. “He got permission from the city to go into one of them. The windows were covered in wood, but he had a flashlight. There was still carpet inside, and wallpaper on the walls — this embossed wallpaper with flowers. Dark squares where people had hung pictures. We went up the stairs — there was nothing wrong with the house, but Dad said one of the hospitals owned the land, and the houses had been designated historic, so it was a stalemate. He knew the names of all the people who had lived in the houses since they were built, in 1873. We walked through the house and he was talking to me as if the last people to live there were still around, just out for a few hours. He told me the man who owns this house probably works not too far from here, in the business district. Perhaps a banker. At night they hear the horses on the cobblestones outside. It’s a normal, everyday sound. There are no parking garages on the other side of the street; there are gardens there and a gate with a key that everyone on the street has a copy of. I had a thought: he and I were as real as those people had been, who lived there once. And our being alive and their not being alive somehow wasn’t that much of a difference between us.”

  Less than five kilometers away, John crossed onto Bay Street. He passed the houses that Bridget was, at that moment, speaking of and continued down toward Queen Street.

  Marianne said, “He got commissions and the university always took a cut of the fee and a lot of the spotlight. His classes were always full. He had a sweet tooth. What else do you want to know?”

  “Why did he kill himself?”

  Bridget turned instinctively to the reporter, but Marianne squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I imagine he was unhappy, Mr. Lowinger. He was sick. And he was probably frightened. He didn’t tell me, so I don’t know.” She stood up. “Do you want a picture of him?”

  “Sure.”

  Marianne searched on the desk for a photo and Bridget marveled at what she’d just witnessed: her mother had charmed someone. John had rubbed off, whether Marianne knew it or not.

  “I don’t know why heritage is such a hard sell here,” said Lowinger. “It just is.”

  “You know what David said?” The reporter waited. “No one wants to hear the story of a whore’s childhood.”

  Lowinger opened his notebook again. He finished writing and looked up into the quiet room. “Is there anything else you want to add?”

  “We’ll have to continue this later,” Bridget said. “They’re done.”

  A moment later they emerged into the snow on Queen’s Quay, and John Lewis crossed Richmond Street heading south.

  FOUR

  THERE HAD NOT been grass underfoot at Richmond and Bay streets in more than two hundred years, but as John crossed through the intersection he felt grass beneath him, and it was June in another time and place. He was almost used now to this feeling of slippage — his waking life had begun to obey the laws of dreams and anything could draw his thoughts away — the sight of cobblestone revealed through cracked asphalt in the side streets near Bathurst, or the smell of bread baking on McCaul. His mind was a net of awareness.

  Now he was in a nearly empty park; the air was warm and the scent of chocolate hung in it. He could hear the sounds of excited children running in and out of the wading pool farther down the hill behind him. He took his sandals off and drowsed a little in the greeny light.

  A woman entered the park off Roxton Road with her dog. She leaned down and unsnapped its leash, and the little apricot-colored animal bolted into the park, head low, its ears flapping. The woman wore an orange one-piece dress with ribbons of light blue swimming through it. Her sunglasses pushed back in her summerlight hair. She called to the dog, but it wasn’t listening. John watched the little animal hit an open patch of grass, drop down into fourth gear, and start running in mad circles, hurfing at the woman whenever it got within range of her. It was a tremendous display.

  The woman clapped her hands with joy. “Oh yeah, you’re ferocious! Who’s a ferocious girl?”

  Two more rotations and the dog broke off again and made a beeline for John. He was still the only other person in that part of the park, sitting on a green bench in front of the abandoned bocce pits, a box of wooden balls at his feet. The dog came right up to him, her tongue pulsing in her mouth.

  “She’s coming,” said the dog.

  “Bailey! Bailey — get over here!” The woman was running now, whether worried for him or the dog, he couldn’t tell. “Sorry,” she said. “She doesn’t go to anyone! I’m amazed she just ran right over here.”

&nb
sp; “It’s okay,” John Lewis said. A few strands of hair had slipped out from behind her ear and she tucked them back. He would beg her not to cut her hair in the years to come, but it was a nuisance to her. “You don’t cut the roses because they grow too tall,” he’d say to her one day, and she’d reply, “Actually, green thumb, you do.”

  “She’s famously timid,” said the woman. “You must smell like fresh hamburger or something.”

  “My cologne,” he said, and she laughed quietly, the first time he ever heard that laugh, a snap of surprise and delight.

  He was something of a sight, sitting alone on a bench with a box of wooden balls at his feet. It made her curious. “Are you from the neighborhood?”

  He pointed west. He lived on a street called Shannon, just off Ossington. “I got an apartment there just before Christmas. This is my first summer down here.”

  “Do they play bocce in your old neighborhood?”

  “I just bought them,” he said, and he hefted the big box into his lap. “A nice old man on the street was selling them in his lawn sale. Ten bucks.”

  “Ten bucks! They cost like a hundred and fifty new. Why would he sell them for ten bucks?”

  “He said the guys he played with were all dead.”

  She screwed her mouth into a sly grin. “Is that true?”

  “Probably.”

  “So you’re just sitting here with them? Commemoratively?”

  “The old Italian men play here. I see them all the time, and I don’t know how to play so I figured —”

  Now she laughed out loud at him, bending over at the waist and catching her sunglasses as they tumbled from her hair. “You’re not!”

  “They can always use some fresh blood.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked once she’d collected herself. He told her, and she said Bridget and they shook hands. “Well, John, it’s Sunday and they’re all in church, so you might have to take lessons from someone younger and not as Italian.”