by Emily Anglin
Otherwise, the words were so alike. Counsel. Console.
It was raining hard, and the wind made the frame of the house lean very slightly now and then before settling a bit deeper into the black, sodden earth. Mattie wanted a blanket but hadn’t yet gotten up to get one. Every few minutes she would pick the manuscript up and read a few sentences before setting it down again, her thumb holding it open where she had stopped.
She gazed out the window, and thought about what it means to offer counsel and what it means to offer consolation. Her thoughts didn’t build to any insight. The raindrops slid down the windowpane in the shape of a whorl, as though travelling inside the tracks of a giant thumbprint on the glass.
Celina was sitting at the dining room table looking at her laptop. She was on a marathon Skype call with her ex, Pete, who had recently lost almost all his money because of a series of misguided decisions that he’d said he couldn’t discuss in much detail in the email he had sent to Celina requesting the Skype meeting; he’d said he needed to talk to her. Pete was now considering declaring bankruptcy.
“Pete, here’s what you need to do,” Celina kept saying, before giving numbered lists of advice. Celina was using headphones to talk to him, so Mattie could hear what Celina was saying to Pete, but not what Pete was saying to her.
How fortunate Pete is, thought Mattie, as she carefully tuned out Celina’s side of the conversation, so she wouldn’t have to share in either the effort Celina was making or the complex misery of Pete’s situation. How lucky to have a friend like Celina, willing to spend her day giving expert advice pre-distilled into steps to be executed, the gift of motions ready to be gone through.
“What are you going to do today?” Mattie had asked Celina that morning, in the bright voice that implied that Celina could do anything at all, even though Mattie knew there were many things Celina couldn’t do with her eyes the way they were.
“I’m going to take a stab at counselling Pete,” Celina had said. “I just can’t stand the idea of a problem with no solution. All he needs is his own willpower and someone else’s perspective. If I can give him that, I should.”
Mattie only enjoyed reading books she had already read before, whose stories and sentences were impressed on her mind, the dirt already turned.
This story of Celina’s she hadn’t read before, of course, so she was having trouble enjoying it, even though she thought it was good. It was a novella that Celina had been writing and rewriting since she stopped working, called The Pleasure Garden. Mattie wanted to be able to talk to her about it, so she was determined to finish reading it.
The Pleasure Garden was a quiet, sparsely written story about a man named Sam, who has recently left his job because of an eye ailment that makes reading impossible. The story follows Sam exploring a huge conservation area in eastern Ontario called Ancient Falls, near the area where Celina herself had been born. In the first chapter, the recently unemployed Sam walks up a winding trail in the bush that he thinks will take him to a waterfall he once found as a child on one of his exploratory rambles. Sam is only fairly certain the waterfall exists. He’s never seen the falls on any map. If those falls were there, they would be the real ancient falls, as opposed to the man-made, far-from-ancient “ancient falls” for which the conservation area was named.
An industrialist who lived near the park had transformed the first section of the Ancient Falls park into a pleasure garden, just before World War I began: an opening lawn party was held in the summer of 1913. The crowning feature of the pleasure garden was a man-made, smaller-scale replica of Niagara Falls that was created by blasting a curve of the river with dynamite to create a deep drop and cascading falls, just below a swimming area with its surrounding manicured lawns, stone fountains, and elegant stone steps leading into the river’s gentle current. Sam liked the deeper part of the park, past the well-tended walking trails and the plagiarized natural wonder.
“As he walked, Sam noticed spent shotgun shells scattered along the edge of the trail. ‘Deer hunters,’ he told himself. The shells were rusty. The hunters had been here a long time ago.”
That was as far as Mattie had gone with Sam.
Celina was on leave now from her job as a financial analyst for an insurance company. She had moved in with Mattie a few years after she’d stopped working. Celina was about a decade older than Mattie, and they had come of age in adjacent but distinct eras. Mattie wasn’t sure to what extent the differences in the zeitgeists that had fostered them accounted for the differences in their personalities. For Celina, career had always been paramount, and to some degree their relationship had been founded on that difference; Mattie’s ideal had always been not to work at all. And if she had to work, which she almost always did, then her goal was to work jobs that couldn’t define her, that she could walk into in the morning and out of at day’s end. This was made possible by the house she had inherited from her grandmother and now lived in. The house meant that her salary as a cashier or a tutor or a freelance writer or some combination thereof was usually almost enough, even when it wasn’t.
By contrast, what Celina had wanted in life was to prove that she could be successful within the domain of money; she wanted to be known as a numbers person, i.e., a finance person. She had achieved that. Their friends had always come to Celina with money questions, Mattie included. Celina had advised Mattie on the process of assuming ownership of the house, a process by which Celina also came to assume a sort of share in that house, in Mattie’s mind, not least because, as Mattie could admit, in honesty to herself, Mattie needed someone with a head for numbers to take care of things, not because she couldn’t, but because she was sincerely loath to.
Because of her financial expertise, Celina—and Mattie, by extension—knew many secrets about their friends, who came to Celina for confidential financial counselling: thus Mattie knew of a secret gambling problem; an online bank account that showed a daily transaction at the liquor store in the amount it costs to buy a single 26-ounce bottle of vodka; and a case of costly emotional blackmail between a man and his former mistress.
“There are three kinds of lives,” Celina had told Mattie once. “Public, private, and secret. And every person has one of each.”
Mattie knew that in Celina’s case, her public life was lived as a financial analyst, but her private life was lived as a writer. Celina’s current life was all private: she rarely left the house.
Mattie had always given a lot of thought to what people care about—not what they would most likely say they care about if asked, but the truth: Celina, Mattie always concluded (when she tried to understand why Celina had sought promotions in a high-status career), must care about power, at least in some form—having it, representing it, or being close to it. Mattie, by contrast, cared about comfort, a by-product of power, which was perhaps part of why she enjoyed having Celina within her sphere. In addition to power, Celina also cared about Mattie. In addition to comfort, Mattie also cared about Celina. Celina had also taken up the job of caring for Mattie some years back. And now Mattie, as she realized, had started caring for Celina too.
Celina had begun counselling Pete on Skype that morning at ten. When Mattie had walked past the table to go to the kitchen to make lunch at around one, Celina was still counselling him.
As she walked past, Mattie had stolen a carefully angled glimpse over Celina’s shoulder at the image of Pete on the screen, framed from just below his shoulders, sitting in front of Celina on their dining room table like an animated sculpture, a bust titled Worry. His face was slightly distorted in shades of blue and grey against the room he was in, a room full of tall, tangled shadows, as though, Mattie thought, he had been projected from an expressionist movie set designed by him, for the purposes of the Skype call, to emphasize his misfortune. He was sitting in what looked like a study. Books lined the walls behind him; a curtain fluttered at a windowsill and then fell still. Mattie had never been i
n that house and neither had Celina, but Mattie gathered from what she’d heard Celina saying about the house’s location and value that it was somewhere remote, somewhere cheap to live.
Mattie kept herself out of Pete’s view as she glanced at him in passing. Was it also raining where Pete was? If so, the rain would match what looked to be his very dark mood. His eyes were puffy with fatigue, and he looked at least five years older than he had the last time she’d seen him. Which, to be fair, Mattie reflected, had been just under five years ago.
It was the weekend their group of friends had rented a cabin together at a pristine rural lake in eastern Ontario, not far from the Ancient Falls conservation area, about an hour away from where Celina had grown up.
Celina had assumed the natural role of host, knowing, as always, how to serve other people: how to make a plan, a budget, a meal, a reservation, a weekend. Mattie had felt out of sorts, with a headache brought on by the humidity and intermittent rain that stacked the air up to the sky in uneasily balanced layers. She lay in bed for most of both days in the room she’d chosen, the room with the single bed for the one unpartnered party; she read a novel she’d read several times before, but not recently enough for it to fail to deliver that particular comfort she sought from a book—the chance to re-enter a familiar but almost forgotten life, to discover not new, but once-familiar places and objects, blurred and changed by who she had become since the last rereading. As she padded around the cabin, around her friends, she found she was thinking about the book and not about where she was.
Late on the second night, Mattie found herself standing at the cabin’s kitchen sink with her back to the room, having a glass of water, while all the others were out drinking on the back porch in the warm night air. Their laughter broke in shards over the empty-sounding flatness of the water. Gazing at the kitchen window, marvelling that she could see nothing of the outside, but only the reflection of the room behind her, and her own face, Mattie saw a movement reflected—the reflection of Pete coming into the kitchen behind her, from outside. Then there was another head reflected behind her own: Pete’s head overlapping with hers in the glass, against the backdrop of the blocked, pitch-dark night, his breath in her ear in that way that forces hearing and touch together into a sixth sense. Mattie pulled away, pushing him lightly so that he fell back. “You’re okay,” she said firmly and quietly, as though he had stumbled and she had caught him. She meant: you thought this could keep happening as long it never seems planned, but that’s not true.
Mattie picked up Celina’s novella again. Sam was still walking.
As he walked, Sam realized it was later than he’d thought; his watch said it was almost four. The cicadas groaned under the pressure of the damp shadows.
From the base of a tree, a blinding glint caught Sam’s eye; he approached and saw that it was a side-view mirror removed from a car, placed mirror-side up on a little mound of sticks, rocks, and leaves. He picked it up and, almost automatically, held it up in front of his face. It was strange to see any face, even his own, in this quiet, lonely spot: the sight of even his own eyes made him feel something that he realized was close to social anxiety. He set the mirror back down on the pile of sticks and continued down the path. Sam decided that no matter how long he thought about it he would never be able to work out why someone had left the mirror there or whose car it had come from, so he stopped thinking about it. There was probably no reason at all why that mirror lay on the ground.
He wanted to be so alone that he wouldn’t be able to recognize the sight of himself, or even to think.
As his legs found a good rhythm for his walk, his mind, unmoored, drifted to thoughts of his boss, Lucy. At almost every one of their monthly meetings, Lucy had encouraged Sam to toughen up. “Don’t be afraid to toughen up, Sam. Every person needs to grow a skin to walk around in,” she had said. “You can’t just go out raw, with your hopes and fears exposed. You’ll never make it.” Yet, when she had told him they were accepting his resignation due to the eye problem, Lucy had called upon his inner strength. “You’re so strong, Sam,” she said, putting her hand on his. “I know you can get through this.” For the first time, as he walked, Sam wondered when exactly Lucy had started thinking he was tough enough to rebound from losing his job, even though she had never found him to be tough enough for the job itself while he was working. Had she thought of him all along as a strong, skinless man walking around naked, with brawny muscles exposed as in an anatomical drawing, eyes bulging wide?
No wonder Lucy had so easily accepted Sam’s resignation. She had probably been terrified.
Sam decided not to think of the office. He had come too far to go back in his mind. He forced himself to think only of the falls he hoped to find. He pictured the waterfall’s foamy torrents, the force of the water driving deep into the dark blue water below, and, above all, remembered the sound, the whiteness of it. But as he pictured the falls, Sam started having trouble not thinking of names he might give them when he got there. He didn’t want to name them; he just wanted to know they were there.
Mattie put the manuscript down, startled from this thought by the chime of a clock. She looked up: the clock wasn’t in their house, but at Pete’s. Celina was still Skyping with him, and had unplugged the headphones. It was five o’clock, at Pete’s place and at theirs. Time for her first glass of wine. Mattie silently thanked Pete for the reminder.
She went to the kitchen and chose a bottle of red wine, and got out the corkscrew. She reached into a cupboard and brought out an empty jam jar made of bubbled glass in the shape of a raspberry that tricked her mind into thinking the wine tasted sweet and new rather than dusky and aged. It was dark in the kitchen: they hadn’t turned any of the lights on for the evening. The house was illuminated only by the last remnants of daylight, and it had been a dark day anyway because of the storm.
“Pete, I’m telling you, this doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems,” Celina was saying. Her voice sounded clear and confident in the quiet of the unlit house. Then there was only the sound of the rain. “Pete?” Celina said after a pause. “I promise it’s going to be okay.” Mattie glanced through the kitchen doorway. Pete’s voice answered quietly, and Celina plugged the headphones back in. Celina’s back was blocking Mattie’s view of the screen. Her shoulders sloped under the soft grey wool of her sweater. Her head was going grey too, mixed with black. Mattie felt tired from Celina’s labour.
There was no clear explanation for the change in Celina’s eyes. “There’s some possibility it could be caused by a concussion,” the doctor had said. “Do you remember hitting your head at any point?” “No,” Celina had said, shaking her head. Mattie had reached her hand out to make Celina’s head stay still. She had had an MRI scan: there was no physical cause for the change in her. But Celina couldn’t work, and she mostly stayed at home now. She was still fine with numbers, but she didn’t talk more than she had to. Today’s money talk with Pete was the most she’d said in a long time.
Mattie filled her jam jar and poured a wineglass for Celina, then lifted both their glasses and the bottle. After she passed Celina, she stretched her arm out and pushed the glass of wine toward her along the table. Pete would only see the full glass appear in Celina’s hand when Celina picked it up, and nothing of Mattie. She carried her glass and the bottle back to her chair. She set them on the floor and picked up the novella again.
Sam had stopped thinking of the falls. Instead, he was trying to empty his head completely, to make the sound of the treetops swaying in the warm breeze serve as a trellis for his thoughts to climb on in vaporous vines toward the white sky. He was just beginning to feel calm when he came around a bend and saw a woman walking toward him on the trail.
“Hi,” Sam said.
“Hi,” the woman said. “Didn’t expect to see anyone else out here. I thought no one else knew about this trail but me.”
“You, me, and some hunters,” Sam sai
d, gesturing toward a shotgun shell on the trail.
“I’ve seen the shells, but I’ve never seen a hunter. I’ve never seen another person in here.”
“Are you coming from the river?” Sam said. “From the falls?”
“No, I didn’t make it that far today. I want to get back before it gets dark.”
The last day of that trip to the cabin, the day after Pete had come up behind Mattie in the kitchen, Celina came into Mattie’s room, where Mattie was reading, and asked her if she’d like to go for a drive to see the house she grew up in, at the far edge of the Ancient Falls conservation area and the associated land. The others had gone out on the water in the motorboat. They would be out for a few hours; thermoses of gin and tonic had been packed, a sandy destination in a bay about an hour’s ride down the river chosen on a map.
Celina and Mattie had been friends for years, but until that weekend, that day, they hadn’t been especially close. It was during the car trip to the farm that Celina opened up.
“This was my dad’s farm, but it was his father’s farm first. My grandfather was exempt from military service during World War II because he was a farmer,” Celina told Mattie as they walked down the treelined country road that led to the lot where the farm had once been. They came to a stop in front of what was now a large empty yard with a big oak tree that had a rope hanging from one branch (the remains of a tire swing, Celina said) and a stone wall that lined one side of the property.
“His contribution to the war was to collect scrap metal,” Celina said. “He would pile it against that stone wall until the pile would get half as high as the house, and then a man with a big truck would come load it all in and drive away with it, so that it could be melted down into metal for weapons. That was, obviously, before my time, but my mom told me about it so many times, and showed me the pictures, and it became like my own memory. Growing up, I loved playing on that wall, because I would find odd bits of metal hidden between the stones or buried in the ground at the wall’s base that had been left over from the scrap pile. A horseshoe, an iron bar, a steel circle. A twisted bit of aluminum. Each of the pieces of metal I found looked like a letter of the alphabet to me, and I laid them all out on the lawn and worked on it until I made them spell something. Finally, I rearranged them enough times that they more or less spelled the words Back through. It could only be a message, I thought. A message planted in the wall during the war by a spy. Maybe my grandfather himself had been a spy. It was clear enough to me what it meant. I had to go back through the forest behind our property. I was officially forbidden from going into that forest, but I had to go.”
