Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  The high surf had shifted stones of all sizes, and Anna stretched her stride from one big one to the next. Everything had an edge to it today, charged somehow with what she’d found yesterday, shoved ashore in storm-swelled waves. The sea’s cleansing hiss had been a constant sound in her morning window.

  She looked back at the spit near Red Murdock’s, casting a high bank shadow where spruce trees clung to the sod at dangerous angles like the masts of a careened ship. She’d hoped Murdock might be out here this morning, but the weekday beach was deserted. Good. It gave her more time. Would she tell him what she had in her kitchen? Not yet.

  After he’d fixed the leaking window, he showed up to attend to a balky water pump, a loose door latch, a moody lamp socket. Anna would watch him work, asking questions so she might fix it herself the next time. He seemed to like her looking over his shoulder, appreciate that she wanted to learn such things, No reason why you can’t, he said, be glad to show you.

  Would he be glad to know what she’d found after the storm, that it was likely more than innocent flotsam? Probably not. Couldn’t she put her situation within the pale of his understanding, his sympathy? Or was that only a fantasy of him, like others she’d had? She didn’t know him. How did you test a friendship with such a man, so with holding, so unlike the men she’d known—one reason she was attracted to him?

  THE BEACH of fine buff sand, cradled in the arm of the point, protected from tidal currents, was littered with rope and eelgrass and small crabs flipped on their backs, their innards plucked clean by gulls or crows. Crows, Willard told her, had keen sight because they liked to eat eyes, even humans’.

  In the distance a semi truck was crossing the bridge, a pale blue box moving between girders. The night of the dog and the bridge swept into Anna’s mind sometimes, she would turn around suddenly, hot and dozy at the shore, and feel winter gust through her, a blank chill, a door flung wide and slammed shut in the same instant when that sight came back brilliantly, searingly cold and clear, the dog tumbling through the air, trying to right itself. Or at the kitchen window in a glance at the bridge’s shape inked in the mist, glimpses of the dog flickered and froze. Why did it seem worse somehow, more persistent, than her own terrifying moments plunging through the ice?

  That night and its aftermath had strengthened her. She was sure of that now. She unfurled her towel on the sand, hot from the high sun, and sat, hugging her knees, absorbing the summer fullness. How long she’d waited for this, the sun in her hair, on her skin! She bought a new swimsuit in Sydney, a sleek black one-piece in a sporting goods shop, she’d lost weight in those cold weeks, so much walking, driven to get outdoors and move, some days she barely cooked. Now the swimming, the sudden chill charging into her, the long, calming strokes as the water warmed, it pumped her, cleared her mind.

  But today she waited, lazy in the midday heat, somehow excited but fearful too, uncertain, pondering a next step. Cut open the plastic bale still damp on the kitchen floor? No. She’d wait.

  The day felt so good, uncomplicated, sensuous, here on the sand alone, she let herself muse on Livingstone, no harm in that, a little fun, luring him back—if his mood had mellowed. She lay down and shut her eyes, smiling into the bright heat. Her Riviera. If her own alluring self were not sufficient, maybe what was now sitting in her kitchen might be. Ah, such foolishness. Were he to reappear, she could never let him know about the bale, for any reason. Murdock, on the other hand.… Why did it seem so necessary to involve him before she acted? He might, troubled by the illegality, insist immediately they turn it over to the Mounties, and she’d be on her own again, the woman from away. Yet, she wanted him to know, or she couldn’t move ahead.

  Anna turned onto her belly and amused herself with possibilities, as if she had great wealth to dispense, to indulge in, and that was all she needed to think about.

  It had arrived on the evening tide, on slow swells crashing up through the stones, stirring them into a dull clatter, and there, something slowly tossing in the surf. A flash of rain gear? Any moment skin, a face, limbs skewing as the waves pushed it clear? She was afraid of its touch, of what she’d have to attest to, of responsibility.

  But it had turned out to be a large bundle, bound in the dark green plastic of garbage bags, smaller than a hay bale. She had kicked it as if it were faking, then pulled it higher up where the stones were dry. She’d walked off a ways before returning, hoping somehow it might be gone, swept magically out into the tidal currents to a further beach, turned up by someone more innocent than she. The light had been in that strange bright zone of a passed storm. There were no boats in the channel or heading in from the sea, no one along the shore but herself.

  So she’d dragged it home, assessing the heft and feel of it along the way, her heart beating so fast she laughed: my kill. She did not want to admit she knew what it might contain, that she was in fact probably certain. She’d never have towed it all the way up the path were it anything but, would she?

  When she felt sleepy in the heat, she shook it off and waded into the water, moaning as her hot skin clashed with the chill. A long, flowing school of minnows shimmered away. She dove into the clear, sandy shallows, swimming hard until her body warmed. It was an exhilarating swim, and when she tired, she floated on her back for a while before walking slowly to shore, the sand so fine under her feet a crab scuttled away in a silty cloud.

  IN THE SPARE BEDROOM Anna sat refreshed and dry in the old rocker, placed as it had been near the window when she’d first arrived. She liked the soft bowl of the seat, compressed into haunches. She could look easily toward the sea where Bird Island lay low and flat, and then south to the cliffs of Black Rock Head, the distant lighthouse tiny and white above the bluff. If she leaned a little forward, she could make out, just above an eastern tree line, the mossy ridge of Red Murdock’s roof—a comforting detail somehow. And she could see the beach, the soft afternoon waves, the water deep blue but greening near the shore. And had there been a figure on the shingle there, at the rocks, Anna could have seen him too.

  She stood up near the window: running slowly and close to her shore, where she’d never seen the lobstermen haul traps, was the white fishing boat, its hull scarred and dirty. She couldn’t make out who was at the wheel, but the crewman on deck, leaning over the rail and studying the shallows, the beach, looked like Billy Buchanan, that head of curly hair. He raised his arm, the engine reversed with a roar, stopping the boat while he probed the water with a long boathook. Was Livingstone steering? Billy motioned ahead and the boat crept on seaward, swaying in the light swells until it disappeared behind the shore woods. They wouldn’t be looking for a bootleg trap in daylight, would they? What then? A sunken bundle? Waterlogged, it wouldn’t be worth much.

  Might someone have seen her trundle that bale up the path? Push it with her foot, winded? Someone on the other shore, along St. Aubin? Not without binoculars, and they could have made little of it, nothing illegal.

  Her eyes shifted sidewise to the dresser mirror. Its old glass, rippled in a yellowish mist, reflected little but her black braid on her breast, the sallow shadows of her face. About Chet she was now more sad than bitter, but the whole matter of looks—her looks, other women’s looks, Chet’s women’s looks, and men’s—still hurt, was still tender. He had shown her too well what she already knew—that she was getting older and that she could do nothing about it that would matter, or that wouldn’t shame her later on. Her frown lines were indelible, she’d joked about them. She had lost weight, she could thumb her waistband out more than an inch. She looked okay. Different, but okay. Livingstone must have thought so. Who but him had seen her dressed up, and then undressed?

  She’d come to like the ghost images in the house mirrors—like the old photos that spiritualists concocted to evoke the dead.

  Could she become addicted to the past? Passéisme. The French had a chic word for everything.

  She remembered suddenly her mother braiding her hair, a tender morning ritu
al that nevertheless brought warm, involuntary tears to her eyes, the alternately gentle, then sharp tugging of her scalp—affection and anger in one motion—the tight neat plaits of hair Anna would later finger absently as she read a book or daydreamed or chatted with a friend. But that sting stayed with her, as if her mother’s unhappiness, in the shadows of the tallest trees in the world, was woven into her daughter’s hair.

  She remembered too those weeks at home she couldn’t sleep, alone by choice in the back room she’d turned into studio and bedroom, leaving Chet upstairs in the old bed, the first step toward leaving him entirely. So often awake, she’d found a tiny FM station, squeezed obscurely into some megahertz slot so slender it was like tuning into outer space. After midnight it ceased playing the eccentric instrumentals the stoned, whispering DJ had collected in his hippie wanderings, his own personal stash, as he liked to say. He’d slip away somewhere and the broadcast would shift to autopilot: nothing but the sounds of surf breaking slowly over and over. A mike had been placed on a coastal shore and recorded hours of sea and wind, sometimes a muted foghorn, the rush and hiss of water through sand, shingle, in soothing, successive waves. She’d lain with her eyes half-closed and sooner or later she drifted out to sea, a swell rose high enough and reached far enough to bear her away. It might have started there, alone in that back room, her journey here. The sea had salted her dreams.

  XX.

  SHE WOKE MUCH EARLIER the next morning. Now the bale, her awareness of it, seemed to alter the house. It felt intrusive, disturbing, an alien object in the humble atmosphere of her kitchen. But to inform the police, bring the Mounties and all that fuss to her home, to the road? She would have to get rid of it. Of course. Red Murdock would know how, wouldn’t he?

  Anna spread a wool blanket over the bale, disguised it further by pushing it against the wall and scattering atop it magazines and dishtowels. While eggs were boiling and tumbling in a pan, she sat in her room and tried to read, sipping tea. She could forget it was there for a few minutes until its shape, somehow heavier, denser, crept into her mind.

  She checked the back door. Across the strait St. Aubin’s hills were dim in early fog. She strained her eyes toward the shore: no one. Gulls rose from the pond, teetered in the wind before sheering off seaward. No vessels on the strait, not the white boat either. She wished she were sure it was Livingstone’s. Had to be. So.

  Out in her field, goldfinches, flowers on wings, radiant in the moist green foliage, the tall neglected grass, the thick dark leaves of the old maple. A mourning dove, lost high in the branches, cooed monotonously. She would carry on as usual. Anna searched her room for the figure drawing of Breagh, she’d wanted to bring it to her house, realizing it was now a kind of offering, though she hoped Breagh would never see it that way. But it wasn’t underneath the big table where she remembered it. Had she moved it somewhere else?

  All right. She had pulled home a thing possibly dangerous, sought after, risky. She had to make decisions, she was in charge of it now. Even setting it adrift again in the dark was not a simple act. But she could make something new happen, or not happen, and she liked that.

  SHE RARELY SAW ANYONE at her shore, up from the point as it was, almost never during the week, and summer people, most of them, had waterfront of their own. But straightening up from weeding her garden she was struck by the sight of a man there where the bank was low, almost level with the sea. She could see him only from the waist up as he moved slowly along the stones, toward the point, his head down. She at first thought Murdock and, pleased, started to wave, but that was not his profile, not hunched, and wouldn’t he have stopped anyway, at least looked up? Then he disappeared below the bank, behind the small stand of stunted spruce. When the man reappeared, he was higher along the shoreline that separated the pond from the strait, too far to make out much of him, only to notice that he’d stopped and seemed to be looking out at the sea. He stood there, hands at his sides, without moving, a still figure. She was about to turn away when she realized he was not staring out at the water but in her direction, at the house, at her.

  She flushed with self-consciousness, trying to imagine what face, what kind of eyes, were taking her in. Whose? She didn’t recognize anything about him. He couldn’t know her, she was from away. She mirrored his stillness, as if that would make her less visible, less vulnerable to any judgment of her. But when he did not move and she could feel the seconds mounting, she shivered: she did not want to flee, that might invite him, seeing she was afraid. And why? Because they were sharing a sightline and she could think of no good reason why? She turned slowly, casually perusing the horizon before heading for the house. In the kitchen, she moved unhurriedly about it, washing carrots she’d pulled, peeling overcooked, hard-boiled eggs. She would not look, she would not put her face in the window, this was absurd, it was daylight, but why were her hands trembling? Crazy weather brought craziness, and that made her fear that if she didn’t look, he might be coming up the path to her door. She had to look: and he was still standing as before, but then he did turn away toward the point. She watched until he sank from view.

  She drank a little brandy straight from the bottle. How foolish to be so shaken! But she stayed at the door for several minutes before she locked it and closed the curtains.

  Trying to calm herself, she passed some time in her workroom, touching up a sketch of a dead gull splayed on the sand, but too aware of why she was doing this, she quit and strode defiantly outside, down as far as the old orchard where she stood amid the trees. Ridiculous. No one had been anywhere around after that storm. Not a boat. Not a person.

  “I’D LIKE YOUR HELP with something, Murdock. Could you come over?”

  “Emergency?”

  “Not exactly. It’s not for the telephone, though.”

  “Over when?”

  “Soon. This evening?”

  “I’ll see you then, Anna.”

  She would have invited him for supper, but there it would be, in the way of their meal.

  Anna towelled off the dark creases of the bale where salt had dried. Maybe a drowned body would have been preferable to this, less complicated. Now she wanted to lie. Oh, no, it was nothing special, Murdock, just a dead animal in my garden, and now something must have carried it away.… No. Not to Murdock. He was her friend, her ally.

  The postcard to Chet lay unmailed. They still had matters to settle, but that was not what she’d bought the card for, a bright view of Cape Breton Island’s west coast where she hadn’t yet driven, rocky in a grand way that would remind him of Big Sur, mountainous, a broad blue sea. Just an impression or two, summer called for that. She owed him no special language anymore, that energy and love that long ago filled her letters when she had tried to bring him, in words, to wherever she was. The message on the address side was postcard boilerplate, no access at all to her life. Should she mention, in code, the incredible stash that had probably washed into her arms? She felt it. Real news. His delight and envy would be spontaneous, genuine, out of their shared past, how could that backwater where you are offer such a landfall? But no, no details like that, and never in pen, not anymore. And the man at the shore? How much weight should she give to him? Murdock would know, she had to pull him in.

  At her garden, Anna tugged out green onions but kept straightening up to gaze toward the sea. She beat dirt from the bulbs, then flung the onions away and headed toward the shore, through the ancient apple trees bearing stubbornly their first green fruit, through the tall grasses laced with thorny stalks of wild roses.

  The Black Rock cliffs caught the sun, a molten line along the high ridge behind her. Waves mixed calmly through the stones.If he instead of her were to cut open the bale, that would assure her innocence, would it not? Murdock too, curious about it, would have taken such flotsam to his house, who wouldn’t, wrapped as it was, taped, obviously important? Unlike Murdock, however, she knew what it was.

  She walked to where she could just see his house up the shore field, th
en she turned back, suddenly unwilling to meet him on his way, casually, cheerily, as she sometimes had. She crossed over to the pond, smoothly dark, another mood entirely from the sea. Gulls clustered and dozed, immobile in precise reflections. She pitched pebbles into the pond, scattering the gulls from their rest, then returned to the house to wait for him.

  “WHATEVER IT IS, she’s wrapped good,” Red Murdock said. He wore a light-blue cotton shirt, neatly pressed, and fresh jeans. He slid his hands over the bale, its plastic, its thick tape. “She floated.”

  “I wonder how long,” Anna said. Because the bale took up much of the table, they stood side by side, regarding it. She knew how its contents would look, smell, taste, what kind of ambience it could bring to a room. How would she tell him now that she might want to keep some of it? How much or how little, and the consequences she imagined, had varied with her moods since yesterday. It was all a risk, but new, unexpected, and somehow invigorating, despite the man at the shore whose stare still ghosted through her mind. She handed him the worn kitchen knife and he sawed at the tape.

  “That could use a stone,” Red Murdock said.

  “A stone?”

  “I meant the knife.” He slashed through layers of plastic. “My granny used this. I used to keep an edge on it.”

  Murdock withdrew a brick-shaped packet, sniffed it. He took from his back pocket his own knife, then carefully sliced the translucent wrap as he might have gutted a fish. He extracted two weedy strands, immediately fragrant. Tops, all flowers. Sinsemilla, Anna shaped with her lips. Expensive as gold now, but someone at parties might have had a little in the old days, days for which she felt a sentimental rush, so superior to the “nickel bags,” cleaning twenty bucks’ worth of pot in the lid of a shoebox, seeds dense as BBs sliding back and forth (I could start a plantation with these, Chet would say, disgusted), gathering with a few grad student friends on the floor of someone’s flat, a candle guttering in sandalwood, passing a joint around and talking talking talking about their peeves and joys, going quiet by turns, distracted by music in the room and in their heads, by the constantly shifting sexual tension, who you were with, who you would like to be with if circumstances allowed.