The woman dresses in her dark green pinstriped suit. Steps into wind and sunlight. The man at the back step, still polishing his shoes. Far out on the horizon, the sky harbours green. They drive, chinook wind chanting, enter the church to Zamfir’s flute. The sisters, a circling throng.
One yellow rose blooms on the altar.
An old teacher the woman hasn’t seen in years waits in the foyer. Pain-tightened lips, his light rosewater smell. Small feet. Grey beard rough against her cheek.
They walk the aisle, a gauntlet of reaching hands, take their place in the front pew.
The sisters rise to sing.
No. Wait. No. Don’t. It’s happening so fast. The sisters step in line.
Faith is an acorn grown into an oak
Faith is Autumn in her burnished cloak
They turn their grief-filled faces, one, features dissolving, the others, stiff and grim, launch into high tenor, soprano, alto, middle-aged women looking foolish, incomplete, the oldest galloping the piano keys. The Watson girls perform.
Faith is the blackbird that sings before the dawn …
Our faith is shaken. A reed shattered in the wind. The minister’s hand lights on the yellow rose. In the midst of our pain, what is there to sustain us? She moves around the pulpit. Outside melody of wind and landscape. We whistle in the dark when we’re afraid. An African woman sings through the pain of childbirth. And the Russians. The Russians have always had a fantastic ear for music.
The man hears her voice through waves of water, bending light.
The Russian army in the First World War had a special position for a chosen soldier: not the lookout, not the bugler, no, the most honoured position was for the one who starts the song. When those Russian soldiers couldn’t sing, when suffering choked their voices, they gleaned strength from the one whose job it was to start the song. The minister sets aside her notes. Looks at the couple. Today you cannot sing; the will is gone. But your sisters start the song for you. One day grace will blow through you like the holy spirit’s wind, and something of music will be born in you again. Outside wind rushes the grasses, whistling through hollow reeds.
A cousin rises, flute in hand. Music keens, sharp-strung debris:
A shame she couldn’t die at birth.
This will make you a better person.
I’m holding off on buying a gift until, you know, we’re sure.
Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Remember, if this one doesn’t — you can always have another.
You’re getting time to recover without two a.m. feedings!
Be careful. Don’t get too attached.
It’s not your fault.
I’m sorry. She’s been discharged.
The dappled flute notes transport them to the sunlit foyer.
The man reaches, wrists aching, holding up the world.
It’s hard to understand.
A time of sorrow leads the way to a stronger faith.
The dark today can sometimes lead to light tomorrow.
Mr. Solantz. We’re awfully sorry, sir.
You cannot predict where an electron will be in the next second. But when it’s measured, its world splits into multiple universes.
May God comfort you in your loss.
Och, there’s so little we can say.
The man reaching in the receiving line holds tight to hands, tries not to disappear.
The church empties. The man and the woman stand pressed together in the windswept churchyard. Are herded downstairs to the funeral luncheon. They fulfill their griefly obligations until the dusk of late afternoon writes itself against the sky, then they move toward the car, the sisters clucking round them, tucking in the woman’s scarf, clinging to the man’s hand, this walk, this long day ending.
Will you be all right? We froze the food. Don’t cook. We’ll call. Fingers laced. Tremulous smiles.
They drive away on singing tires to step across their crooked sidewalk. The walk they crossed, joyous, to birth a child six endless months ago. A dog steps out the open door to greet them. This place of stone the night the child came.
Snow is melting on the sidewalk steps. The sky in chaos, birds in swooping song. A ginger butterfly explodes in flight between the poplar branches.
The man thinks, So many quantum leaps.
The pain is like the light. Its waves go on and on.
I opened to my beloved, but my beloved was gone. I sought her, but I could not find her. I called her, but she gave me no answer.
The woman steps out into afternoon April sunlight. The neighbour across the street is mowing the lawn while her husband drowses on the porch steps. Spring’s flightiness. The husband jolts awake. His gaze follows the woman pushing the lawn mower against the sunlight. Everywhere puddles shine. First week of springlike weather, enough to melt the snow. Vestiges of winter, gone. Life no longer safely frozen.
The street is deserted. Another hour and denim-clad teenagers will stream onto Charleswood Drive, shoving one another, high-stepping through puddles, in love with the crazy sun, with the crazy thrust of summer.
The screen door closes. The man makes his way down the steps. In the woman’s hands, a small vase shielded in a mulberry cloth bag. Two cats appear, parade the sidewalk. Tails high, they meander down Charlebois, the drone of the lawn mower reassuring on the pitching breeze.
The woman stops at the sidewalk. The neighbour grins at her. The glare of sunshine shivers new green buds. The woman brushes hair out of her eyes. The slouched husband waves back.
The man and woman step onto the road, wait for a car to cross, then start in silence up the street. Piano notes dapple the air. Such intense sunlight. Light cuts through everything. The soft growl of a dog. Abandoned chairs against a patio. The woman’s heart is strained. She is so tired now. The road is empty, the only moving objects this April afternoon, a man, a woman, one neighbour, two cats skulking through the hedge, spring buds.
They cross Capri, head north and west, the line of houses breaks away and becomes parkland, the earth’s heat rises; overhead, rocking blue sky. They pass a park, mount the street, Nose Hill brown hay above them. When they reach John Laurie Boulevard, the man takes the bag, her hand, as they wait in the churn of cars, straight-backed against the wind, the honk of horns, the dust.
A space opens in traffic, and they run, stop on the boulevard, shirts twirling, they blow across, buried in windy clothes.
And now they start the long climb up Nose Hill.
I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley. As a lily among thorns is my love amongst the daughters.
There is a lovely winding path that leads off the paved thoroughfare onto Nose Hill. You can catch it at the Brisbois turnoff. Just beyond a twist of bush and briar, the path breaks into three. It heads west toward Shaganappi, straight up, or east toward the Winter Club. The east path winds upward behind a half-kilometre row of poplars, hides the climber behind a rise of hill so there is country on all sides.
The man and woman take the east path, dissolve into greenery. Restless wind, ripping landscape, wild grasses, breezy sunlight. They move, two figures, over a burned-out patch of hill until they reach the summit. Wild roses thorn ravines. Their fragrance on the wind. The shimmer of quivering reeds. One crocus under snow.
I am my beloved’s; her desire is toward me.
Light falls. It bends and scales, colours collide, as swirled by sunlit gusts, she lifts her hands.
Releases to the wind.
On a wind and light-filled Monday morning Jasmine Forester, the lady of the heart, presents herself at the door in a pale lavender suit with matching scarf and earrings. Here, she informs the woman, to retrieve the heart monitor.
The lady of the heart steps into the baby’s bedroom. Machines still chug. No one has entered this room. No one has shut down life support. The constant curve of time.
The door sighs open.
She pulls the plug.
Absolute zero.
&nb
sp; Outside, a swallow sings.
I’m sorry your daughter is dead, Jasmine Forester says from the safety of the doorstep. Her words scatter down the stairs in tumbling particles of light. How was anyone to know the child was so ill?
The clicks of her high-heeled shoes tapdance the afternoon away.
The woman climbs Nose Hill. Voices. A chorus. Listen. Listen. Who knows what this earth holds. How many ashes have caught the wind as loved ones swallowed light and let them go.
The sage and silence of this place.
It’s springtime. The first rains wash old dust. The earth in song.
Where does a child end, where does the earth begin?
The man drives to school through stars and sunsets, through the twist and turn of seasons. Enters his small, new-smelling apartment, leaving lights off as he goes.
Home alone nights in this strange space he feels the habit of the woman’s hands. An arch of foot. Hollow of underarm. Hears her voice saying crazy, indignant words, he hears her laughing stories; her voice stays with him evenings as if she’s at the kitchen door.
She might have been a forest ranger, she said those first days after.
Putting away the milk, She’d have liked archeology. Scratching scar into possibility until he could have choked. And when he wouldn’t answer: Say it. Say her name.
With time, people slip into their names. The child’s left open. No time to enter it. No time to be it. How could he explain his need to have the silence cradle her.
How could he explain what’s buried must stay buried.
How could he explain there’s no such thing as time.
He read and reads.
If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars … The important thing is what can’t be seen … If you love a flower that lives on a star, then it’s good at night, to look up at the sky. And all the stars are blossoming … He can say to himself, “Somewhere, my flower is there …”
The man’s son doesn’t ask about a baby born in this western city, in another life. And the man doesn’t speak of her. The boy visits in the summers. He is almost seven now. The man drives the boy to baseball games, to ice cream shops; they fly a kite; they walk along the river and the man explains light waves.
He keeps the baby separate, hinged in windy landscape. Skin starred by moonlight. Scars criss-crossing her heels.
Dust, seasons, scars and weather, pages turn, the city grows. The woman’s sisters send her to Banff for a massage. Take a day away. Go for a drive. Her thirty-seventh birthday. Her husband gone eight years. Summer ending. The woman drives toward granite mountains, toward a late August afternoon. The car speeds into sunlight, into wind, then rain. The sun comes out again, illuminates wet pavement. The woman slides toward mountains on the lull of summer tires.
Banff is busy with seduced tourists, grabbing elusive summer heat. The woman winds her way past in her small Toyota, over the bridge to a distant part of town. A wrinkled Hungarian woman opens the door to a private dwelling. The woman steps inside.
A high cot waits in the tiny living room. The woman disrobes, climbs naked onto the narrow table, skin cool, then wanting, beneath a yellowed sheet.
The old one has efficient hands. Forceful, they stroke the woman’s wrists, forearms, her feet, move into curve and swell, their rhythm steady, strong. The woman closes her eyes.
Who’s Rose?
The woman jolts on her narrow bed. Why — Rose? — well, she’s my sister.
The old one works the woman’s temples, jaw bone, rhymes her hands across the woman’s freckled shoulders. She has a zippy personality, your sister?
Rose? The woman struggles to sit up; the old one’s firm hands hold her down.
Tell her not to drive through any yellow lights.
The woman’s language scatters like wingtips of startled birds. A strong pull down and down and down — buttocks, thighs, circling behind her knees, her calves, her skin tingling the length of its desire.
The room fills with the scent of buttercup and wild rose. The woman on her back. Like a mother kneading bread dough, the Hungarian works the woman’s bones. A stillness from some other place. Lost words. Light passing on the ceiling. The old one’s hands. Nearby the river flows. A droning bee travels the window. Cars shift out on the road. Fused light the colour of summer grain.
Who’s this? The old hands arrest on the woman’s breastbone. A child. She’s dead. She’s here.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved that you tell her I am sick with love.
I didn’t know you would come back.
The child’s hair flows along her head like fire.
Above them, the flight path of a plane. It moves across the sky, the hill, into prairie wind, and disappears.
The child’s breaths cold on her face.
They both are smiling.
The man looks about this room he has painted the colour of evening sand. Things do not go together the way they come apart. Time props itself up like magazines in a cigar store; he is the browser. In the corner of his den he keeps an ancient globe, a map of the world the way it used to be, made up of simple elements: water, wind, earth, fire. Ancient history. He rubs his neck muscles which are always aching. History is no story with beginning, middle, end. It is a string of simultaneous events, past leaking into future; the future into past.
But the little prince was anxious. You were wrong to come. You’ll suffer. I’ll look as if I’m dead and that won’t be true.
The man’s head commingles of late his many years of lessons. Radio waves have always existed; people just didn’t have the ability to detect them. A rainbow doesn’t exist as a material object. It appears in a different place to each observer.
The man looks out his darkening window. Nothing in the way of evidence — no letter, phone call, touch. Only a dog’s dream to say that she was real. He feels his life repeated in a thousand empty lives. Energy slips in its entirety to another level, no longer made of particles; it exists, but it’s a wave. The dark brings such sharp loneliness; the heart asking too much.
A flutter. The man turns in his dusky flaxen room. His dog rises, growling, on the far side of the wall. She pads down the hall paralleling the man’s den. Growling softly, she seats herself outside the closed door. A flutter at his cheek. Butterfly-wing light. His hand rises to the touch. A moth? No. Quick and silver, he feels the fluted air, the strange world breathing.
Goodbye, said the fox. Here is my secret. It’s quite simple. One sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
The man looks out across the city, across the future, present, past, where stories come apart; where you catch sight in pieces.
Listen.
Melody floats the room
the settling ashes
pure, desiring
he cups her in his hands.
The child stands. Air fogs between them.
The prairie grasses sound a note.
Wind spills its gusts inside the woman.
Down below a light illuminates an upstairs room.
Night draws. It has begun to sprinkle. A storm gathering on the horizon.
The woman’s veins rivers of molten glass. Air in the trees, the telephone wires sound A minor.
Allegro, cantabile, grazioso. Dolce.
The woman stops halfway down, looks back.
The child, darkening, merges with the landscape.
The note sounds clear now.
One beautiful still tone.
Umbilically corded.
Ne m’oublie pas.
The man sits in his den. He feels an energy. Late autumn sunlight floods his desk. The sun has long passed its summer solstice; the year is heading toward its shortest day. He holds a pen, looks through molecules of evening light. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has woven time and space together, curving through the stars, bending light away from a straight line. Severa
l particles in a single quantum system share a single inseparable psi field: entangled. Erwin Schrödinger called entanglement the most profound characteristic of quantum mechanics. Einstein called it spooky. Anything that happens to one particle affects the other. They could be in separate galaxies, yet remain in a single quantum state. The man’s hands reach for his books. The world turns beneath your feet; you learn to right yourself. You learn to keep on walking. You learn too late that questions need not be answered; rather, answers must be questioned. You learn to live with choices. You learn to live with loss. No point in longing for the light; too much light blinds. His son’s last visit the man took him up Nose Hill. The boy ran and ran, tireless, until he reached a large stone where he sat, waiting.
Nothing ceases to exist, the man said, joining his son on the rock. Matter turns back to energy. The boy kicked his football, ran to retrieve it, wiggled back up beside the man. Did you know, the man said, that we are made of atoms formed from hydrogen in stars? That stars are most radiant when they die? We’re made from stars that died long before our world was formed. We’re made from stardust.
The man gets up, makes himself some tea. The recent many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics suggests that the world splits, creating multiple universes. Each one real. Time loses all meaning when you jump from world to world. For reasons physicists can’t yet understand, people only see their own.
The man pulls down a mug from the top shelf. All you can do is seek to fulfill the mind’s yearning. That’s what physics is, a fairy tale, small glimpses of our world projecting us into a timeless universe where anything can happen. The bigger a scientist’s imagination, the more possible events he can see. It is thinking that keeps the man from going crazy.
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