Cleo feels this happen: the succession of impressions, the unknown young man with the pleasing, symmetrical, oval face, light hair, slight beard; then, the familiar cast of family features, the family resemblances; then a face that clicks into place as familiar, long-known: you. You.
Mandalay says, Ben, this is Cleo.
Cleo puts out her hand. She sees realization (not recognition) openness, curiosity, embarrassment flicker in succession in his eyes.
I was meaning to call you, he says.
It is so inadequate, so paltry, that her heart shrivels a little inside her. It’s every flimsy excuse ever made to the one who loves by the beloved, to the one who cares excessively by the one for whom the caring is invisible, or taken for granted, or a small source of embarrassment, something unearned, never longed for.
But of course it is not that. He doesn’t remember her. He doesn’t know. She can’t even resent his oblivion. It’s the best fortune he could have had, that he doesn’t remember her, has not missed her.
He can’t join them: plans. But he’ll catch up with them soon. He moves down the street; he is gone.
Cliff bicycles off, is gone, too.
She needs to check up with him more often. She doesn’t like the look of that bruising.
THE LAST TIME Cleo saw her brother Che was in the fall of 1989. She was in university, in her third year. She had moved into a new place, a house in Kitsilano that she shared with three other girls — women. The three others were there before her, and when Cleo had answered their ad, she had been worried that they would not want her as their fourth. They all seemed much older than her, grown-up, focused. The house was well-kept; it was the opposite of the grungy student suites she was used to seeing. One of the women was wearing a suit, which seemed awfully sophisticated. As it turned out, the woman in the suit was the same age as Cleo, and was considered the least sophisticated of the group: She worked part-time in a bank to put herself through school, whereas the other two, in their sweatpants and T-shirts, had wealthy parents who were supporting them. But these refinements of class and dress, Cleo came to understand only later. The two wealthier girls were great partiers, and leavers of doors unlocked and pans on the stove and water running, and food and clothes piled up in corners. They, not Cleo, were the classic undesirable roommates. But at the first meeting, they all took pains to appear sensible and responsible, and they accepted Cleo, to her relief.
But then Che had moved to Vancouver, and had started showing up at Cleo’s house, always without warning, and after she’d just arrived home, as if he’d been watching her house. She’d made the mistake of mentioning this timing to her roommates, who said it was creepy. One of them insisted that Che was a drug addict. Was he? Cleo didn’t know. Certainly he had been dirty, and sometimes hungry in the way of people who have not eaten much in weeks, and had smelled of pot. Had sometimes seemed stoned. He had sometimes been jittery, but he might have been sleep-deprived, starving. He sometimes had no place to sleep, and she’d let him sleep on the floor of her room.
He had changed his name to Shane, and his skin had darkened so much from living out of doors that she hardly recognized him.
Her roommates had said he was scary, he needed help, they didn’t feel comfortable with him hanging around. She’d understood. He’d turned up in the middle of the night, was having an argument with someone outside their house, and she’d paid for a cab to take him to a shelter.
Her roommates, though they were partiers themselves, were cross about the middle-of-the-night shouting. They thought they might get evicted. The mother of one of her roommates was a substance-abuse counselor who told Cleo, via her daughter, that as long as Cleo was giving Che money or other kinds of support, she was enabling Che’s addiction. Tough love, the roommate’s mother said.
Cleo was giving Che money, but not much. She never had much. He never wanted to take it. She did not want to enable him, as people said, but she didn’t want him to starve. He was but he was not still her little brother.
Cleo had said to Che: It’s better if you don’t come by here anymore. And he had not. And a few weeks later, he was dead: He had died of a combination of exposure and overdose, hitchhiking back to town from a logging camp he’d been kicked out of.
She could not save both Che and Cliff. She had saved Cliff. She had done that. She had not seen, at that time, how she could save herself and both of them. She had saved herself and Cliff, but not Che.
She had not been able to save Bodhi, but he’d been fine. In the bigger scheme of things, in a world where babies in Third World countries die at the rate of one per minute, or something like that, he’d been really, really fine.
WHEN SHE GETS BACK to her house the next morning, her breasts hard with milk, Sam gives her the cold shoulder. He doesn’t seem interested in nursing. She has to express milk, for the pain. In the evening Trent puts Sam to bed while she’s still clearing up the dishes, and he still won’t nurse, and she has to express again, but there’s only a little milk, and in a couple of days more, there’s none.
Afloat
THE FLIGHT TO SANDSPIT is scheduled once a day and arrives at three in the afternoon. Descending, Mandalay sees the islands against the sea, more rounded, thickly-forested, than she had imagined. The intense green of the conifers is brilliant against the dark blue-green of the sea. White scrim along the shores. White of boats. Then, a cleared area, roofs of buildings, black strips of road that end suddenly. And near the end of the descent, the waves and gulls visible just above them.
They have a vehicle and driver waiting, a big SUV and a young Haida man called Gerry, who loads their gear — four duffle bags — into the back, and opens a rear passenger door for Mandalay, the front one for Duane. It’s an hour’s drive still to the bed and breakfast in the bay where they’ll stay the night, and set out from in the morning. Gerry is booked to pick them up again in the morning, carry them and their equipment to the kayak rental shop at the government docks.
They have salmon steaks at the only restaurant in town. Eat, Duane says. Might be your last meal for a while. He seems keyed up, a little edgy, not present. She tells herself she won’t ask what’s wrong, but then she does, and he says he’s just anxious about the trip arrangements. I sweat the details, he says.
There’s no internet at the bed and breakfast. Their host shrugs, her pleasant round face untroubled. Sometime we’ll get it, she says.
Duane seems irritable, or rather, that he’s trying not to be irritable. He says, I should have thought about not having internet.
Do you need it? Mandalay asks.
Of course I need it, or I wouldn’t be worried about it, would I?
It’s the first time he’s showed irritation in front of her, let alone towards her. He apologizes. I shouldn’t have left this loose end to tie up when I got here, but I was waiting on somebody else to provide some information.
It’s okay, she says. She’s not sure it is, but she wants him to relax, to let go of work. Maybe you can phone, she suggests. She knows his mobile doesn’t have service here, but there are phones.
He spends half an hour in a phone booth near the docks, comes back whistling. Took care of it, he says, and kisses her.
There’s a long evening to pass, even after they’ve walked to the restaurant and back to their bedroom, to the docks and back again. It’s very light out. Mandalay has been up since four — she went to the café for the morning — and is tired, but not sleepy, and Duane seems excited too. They walk on the shore, which is steep, rocky, here, and then finally just sit on one of the cedar logs and watch the water. After a few minutes, Duane whispers: Turn slowly. To your left. And she does, and there’s a mottled brown bird about as high as a table standing on the rocks, ripping at a good-sized salmon with a beak the bulk and shape of a man’s hand, if he were to hold it up in a pincer shape.
Duane’s hand is on the small of her back; she feels the pressure increase there as they watch the bird. Immature bald eagle, she knows. The
bird’s talons shift on the fish as it bends its head for another tear.
Nice welcome, Duane says. The eagle swivels an eye toward them, but it’s clear he — or she — has known they were here all along, and not been bothered.
When it’s finally getting dark, they walk back to the bed and breakfast, and other guests are there now, who’ve been boating or hiking all day. The house has a big fireplace in a high-ceilinged log room, and the other guests, two couples from Germany, are drinking and talking. They offer Duane and Mandalay some of their whiskey, in fluent English, and for a little while they all sit and talk comfortably: Where have they gone? What have they seen? Where are they planning to go next?
Then Mandalay can’t keep her eyes open any more. I have to go to sleep, she says. You can stay down here. She can see Duane is enjoying himself, relaxing.
She doesn’t wake up when he comes to bed, but later, when he shifts position for what feels like the fourth or fifth time. She has the sensation that he’s been moving around a lot.
Sorry, he says. He kisses her forehead, tucks the covers around her. Now you know why I don’t have you sleep over more.
She wakes again to see him at the room’s small desk, typing by the glow of his laptop screen. She’s still tired, but now it’s about the time she wakes up for work, and her body clock is bringing her to full consciousness against her will. Hey, she says, come to bed, and he does, smiling.
I’ve got something to make you sleep, she says, and goes down on him, shaking her head when he reaches for her after a few moments, finishing him off. She hasn’t done that before: He hasn’t asked, and she doesn’t think it’s a good habit to encourage. Then he falls asleep quite quickly, and she’s awake, lying awake, until after dawn. Then she falls asleep, but now he’s up: They have to get moving, as Gerry will be there with the truck for their gear.
So we begin the trip sleep-shorted, and not really connected, she thinks.
They’re staying in protected areas, mostly, on the lee side of the archipelago, between the islands where the ocean is tempered. Only twice they’ll have to take on potentially rougher water: once crossing a strait that is cut through by a strong current at certain tides, and once travelling from one island to the next in a stretch that is more open.
Duane has planned it so that they need paddle only a few hours a day, and that they can break this up into shorter stretches, with stops. Still, her shoulders ache, and her abdominal and lower back muscles, as well. When they stop for the day, they massage each other, which gives relief, and leads, always to sex. They don’t sleep well at night: It’s cold and the foam mats are never enough against the rocky places they find to pitch the tent. It rains, or the wind blows things around. The nights are always loud, busy — and short. In the tent, they have only a few hours of darkness. One night they hear someone rummaging through the bag of equipment they’ve left outside — and Duane sets forth warily, with the flashlight. It’s a pair of otters: Mandalay sees them in the beam of the flashlight before they drop the bag and amble off, grumbling.
They see bald eagles and ospreys, and seabirds: surf scoters, with their big bodies, their naked faces; crested mergansers and guillemots and scaups. They paddle over kelp beds and see otters sleeping, as they float tethered to the stipes. They see bears fishing and swimming, and one day a small pod of orcas.
They see other kayakers, and sailors, and hikers. They share a hot pool fed by natural springs with a pair of Finnish geologists who tell them that the archipelago lies on a fault line, that the west coast of it drops off steeply, the edge of a continental shelf, and the islands are bubbling up out of the sea, squeezed out from between the two plates like glue from a mortised joint.
They pull ashore at small villages, where carved cedar poles stand addressing the sea, speaking to the creatures of the sea, telling the story of the people who live on the shore, who have become separated from the sea. In a museum they read about Raven finding, after a cataclysm, the first people, hiding in a shell on the beach.
My brother Cliff would like this story, she says. He would say the shell was actually a spacecraft, and Raven some chief or shaman. He likes origin stories. He would like it here. He watches nature shows almost exclusively, on TV.
My brother Al was like that, he says. He went to the Galapagos when he was in his early twenties.
They buy food, liquor, when they can, at the villages. Duane buys a carving which will be shipped home for him: gift for his parents, he says. It’s a replica mask, fierce with teeth and abalone-button eyes. Small children greet them, follow them. They wear warm, bright-coloured clothing.
They eat at a sort of communal barbecue that feeds tourists, and the cooks and servers sit and eat with them at wooden tables in a roofed-over pavilion. A woman asks Mandalay: What are you? Salish? No, you don’t seem Salish. You’re not practical enough. Dreamer.
Duane has raised an eyebrow, but says nothing. Mandalay says, I don’t know. My mother would never tell me.
Where’s she from?
Southern Alberta. I think.
Crystal’s stories tend to shape-change, but that seems the most stable of them.
Blackfoot, maybe, the woman says. Blackfoot are dreamers.
Then she turns to Duane. You stick by her, now. Indian women aren’t for using up and throwing away.
They don’t sleep as well at night but they take to sleeping in the afternoons, stacking the two mats and one of the sleeping bags, lying spooned on the narrow space, and in the full brightness of the day through the blue walls of the tent, giving themselves to the luxurious deep sleep of children, while their clothes, which are always damp, hang in the sun and wind.
They catch or gather food for their meals, and Mandalay finds herself constantly ravenous, salivating for the protein and salt and iron before the food is even cooked. They eat mussels and periwinkles and a kind of seaweed every day; these can be gathered from the rocks at low tide, and it’s safe to eat them here, so far from cities and pollutants. When they come to a flat beach of mud and sand, they dig small sweet clams and steam them in a pot and eat so many that they leave the beginnings of their own shell midden. That night, they run along the long flat beach, their footsteps glowing with bioluminescence.
In the equipment they have rented with the kayaks are small shovels, a little axe, a spear. For fish, Duane says. In a sheltered cove Duane strips and swims out carrying the spear, one of the equipment nets from the kayaks, which has floats attached, and, in his teeth, a knife. She thinks he’s doing it boyishly, laughs. But when he comes in she looks up to see him walking up the beach naked, shedding drops of water, the net full of sea-creatures, which he spreads in front of her: abalone, sea urchins, a couple of rock perch speared through, a giant, menacing crab. He’s Neptune, he’s Poseidon, he’s some more prehistoric god, earlier than Poseidon. His body shines; the droplets of water blaze in the sun. The sea creatures bristle and stir. Fruits de mer, she thinks, remembering a restaurant menu. The fruits of the sea. Here they are, truly, in a way she hasn’t understood the phrase before. There is something primeval about them, something truer and older than plated seafood. They are living. Although they wall themselves in or menace futilely with spine and claw, she will eat them; they will become part of her. She will be part of the sea, in turn.
There are droplets of sea water in Duane’s eyebrows and chest and armpit hair, his pubes. His body is shining, muscular, streaming with water. He has speared two fish; he has pried oysters from rocks with a knife; he has brought her food caught with his bare hands. If this is the peak of it all; if this is the best moment they will have, it will be enough.
He shows her how to crack the sea urchins open and suck out the gelatinous insides. She doesn’t want to at first — she’s repulsed — but then can’t get enough of the salty, slightly watermelon matter. A couple of the urchins have roe and that she eats also, ravenously.
AND THEY TALK. In the tent, in the kayaks, scrambling over rocks and trails, they talk.
They talk about things they have never talked about before, or have not dived into very deeply. Duane tells her now not about the cases he has won. But the ones he has lost. He tells her about the mistakes he has made, the ones he has not been able to repair.
She tells him about Butterfly Lake, finally. As she guessed, he has heard of it: He remembers the news stories. That would have been, when, the mid to late seventies, he says. You’d have been a kid then.
Whatever you heard, it was probably exaggerated, Mandalay says.
Of course it was, he says. Later information showed that. It was kind of blown up by the media.
It wasn’t even really Butterfly Lake people, Mandalay says. But all people think about now, when they hear Butterfly Lake, is that there were eleven child mortality cases between 1975 and 1978.
Well, that is a lot.
Eleven children. Two had drowned on a raft in the lake. One had fallen down an old mineshaft, and one off a deck with no railings. Three had been left alone in a house that had caught fire when the space heater malfunctioned. The other four had died of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition and exposure.
He says, I remember you told me you were split up, put in foster homes, after your father died. That would have been what year?
She says, it wasn’t the same thing. Those other kids — they were outsiders, not taken care of properly. We weren’t part of that. But social services was so jumpy, after that.
They overreacted.
Yes. We were fine, really. We had lots of people around us. My mother was getting better. But social services just swooped in. They had an agenda. They made her sign that she’d given us up, so we couldn’t go back, even when she was better.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 16
