She is telling him this as they lie in the sun, one afternoon. It’s warm; they’ve spread the mats and sleeping bags in the sun, and are lying on them, in a small meadow.
He tells her about his wife as they are paddling. They’re trying to cover a few kilometres of coastline in one stretch, to reach the next sheltered cove before late afternoon, when the wind is supposed to pick up. He says, we met in university: We met at a party, when we were twenty-one, and that was it. We both knew right away that we wanted to commit. Of course our families, friends, told us we were nuts. Twenty-one! We still had to finish our degrees, and then we should go to grad school, and not in the same place, as I was heading for law and she was going to do medicine. We both wanted to specialize, so that would add on years. But we did it, you know. We were apart for five years. We saw each other holidays; we wrote letters. There was no email and long distance phoning was really expensive. And we stayed exclusive, and missed each other like hell. We both suffered.
And then we were both done, and I managed to get on with a law firm in Vancouver, with a chance to do commercial law, and she got a residency at Children’s, doing pediatrics, which is what she wanted. So we got married: We had the big wedding, and the parents and friends were, I’m sure, all congratulating themselves on their good sense in telling us to be sensible and wait.
And then Ellen got pregnant, and that was wonderful too, though we hadn’t even had a year together yet. And then, four months in, she was diagnosed. It was pretty advanced; she’d probably had the tumour for a year. It was so small, still. Pea-sized. She could hardly feel it. But it was in her lymph nodes.
She terminated the pregnancy: She didn’t want to, but it was her only chance. I forced her, I think. She had surgery and months of chemo, and she was very sick; she got every side effect possible. And then she was in remission for three months, and then she wasn’t: It was in her liver, her bones. Her spine and hips started to crumble like cheese. The pain was unbearable. More chemo, which she hardly survived, but the cancer devoured her, anyway. Her liver stopped and the toxins and pain medication deprived her of her ability to speak or to reason. There was constant nausea and pain and confusion, for three weeks, which was too long. She was gone already.
The last time I talked to her, I didn’t know it would be the last time. She was in hospital, and I went to the office to tie up some loose end, and when I came back two hours later, something had shifted. They’d upped the Demerol or something. She couldn’t come up to the surface enough to interact, and she never did after that.
It takes him about half an hour to tell the story, around her questions and his explanations. During this time a heavy fog settles around them, and then the wind picks up, and they have to head to shore.
He says: Ellen was my best friend. The only person I ever felt really knew me. Knew me completely. There was no space between us. No gaps.
There is almost no space between us, Mandalay thinks. Is there?
The next day they paddle through a shallow tidal zone between two of the islands, a wash of sea so shallow that the seabed is visible under the kayaks for a kilometre. It’s speckled with the white of clams and ruffled, bright-green kelp, and with sea stars, purple and ochre, in their scattered thousands. It’s like a night sky drawn by a young child, by her niece Olivia, Mandalay thinks.
They have no radio, but at their previous landing Duane picked up the latest maritime weather forecast, which had predicted squalls this afternoon. Now they must stay put until the storm finishes and leaves. The fog vanishes, and they watch the squall build across the water: It looks like an invisible being is moving across the sea’s surface, stirring the water into fury. They pull the kayaks higher up the beach, then higher again; the waves keep surprising them with their reach. It’s suddenly impossible to put up the tent. They retreat into the forest with their bags, find a relatively dry spot under the spreading boughs of a cedar. The sky darkens, the treetops thrash, the rain begins. Not all of the water runs to the tips of the cedar boughs. They use the tent as a poncho and wrap themselves in the sleeping bags.
Now there is little to say; both of them have withdrawn into themselves a little, Mandalay thinks. But it’s okay. It’s a comfortable silence. Duane heats some soup mix in water, expertly, with no fuss, on the butane stove, and they drink it, and then have some of the jerked meat and dark chocolate rations that they’ve ignored so far on the trip. This fare produces intense thirst, though, and Mandalay fills a metal bowl over and over, and they drink it up. It gets dark, or rather darker, and the sound of the waves grinding the gravel of the shore becomes paramount. Then she falls asleep, somehow, curled into Duane, but wakes in the night, has to pee, disturbs him trying to extricate herself from the cocoon they’ve made, and gets wet just moving a few trees away to crouch in privacy. She crawls back in, and can’t get warm enough to fall asleep again for some time.
At one point she feels Duane’s watch on his wrist; his arm is around her and her hand in his, and she slowly removes it, presses the button for the light on his watch, reads the time: 2:45.
His familiar arm, his familiar watch.
My man, she thinks.
When she wakes again it’s light, and Duane standing a few feet away, his back to her, pissing what seems like a great distance into the rain. He’s cheerful, joking. Does she want him to dive for some more abalone? Sea urchins? The sea is still grinding away at the shore, the slap of the waves and the roar of the gravel as it is dragged back filling her ears, and more: taking up a good deal of her attention besides, Mandalay feels. She wonders if she will want to hear the sea for a while after this, or smell it.
They spend part of the day cocooned, again, dozing, talking a little. The rain stops for a while at midday, and they crawl out and down to the beach; the kayaks, pulled up under the trees, are safe, but the beach has actually changed shape during the night. The sea, at the height of the day’s light, is glowing grey-green: it must look like the luminescence of something dying, Mandalay thinks. The waves are still terrifyingly high. She can’t imagine that they will be able, ever again, to venture out on it in their little shells of boats.
Then the rain starts up again, and they retreat to their shelter under the cedar, their cocoon. Now Duane is sleepy, but she is not, and she sits with her back against the tree trunk daydreaming while he sleeps with his head on her lap, his legs curled around and entangled with hers. She feels at once protective of him and protected by him. She thinks of a poem she used to like when she was younger — in her early twenties, perhaps, she’d written it out and taped or tacked it to the wall above whatever bed she was inhabiting then. Love consists in this, the poem read, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
It is not impossible, she says to herself.
Around them the rainforest a temple of green shawls.
Jam
JULY AND THEY ARE GOING ON VACATION: going, as they do every other year, to visit Trent’s family, or rather, to stay at Trent’s family’s cottage. It’s a long way to travel, but it is free. It is worth the trouble of the trip, flying to Toronto, then driving to the lake, because it’s all paid for by Trent’s parents.
Cottage is a misnomer: It’s a house, bigger than Cleo’s and Trent’s house, and then there are two smaller houses that really are cottages, that belong to Trent’s older brothers, whose children are in their late teens and early twenties, already. Trent’s sister does not have a cottage, but her husband’s family does, only a few miles away. When she is on the island, she and her two children, who are in their teens, stay with Trent’s parents, as do Trent and Cleo. Trent’s parents’ house is so large that they are not at all crowded.
All of these are situated on an island in a lake, on land that is very rocky, or that consists, as far as Cleo can tell, of solid rock that has been sculpted by the wind and water so that it looks like cake frosting spread in long swoops. Frosting made of basalt. In hollows here and there, enough earth has gathered for plants to g
row. The trees seem to grow out of solid rock.
And then, of course, there is the lake. The first summer, when they reached it, she was confused by its size: She couldn’t see the other side. Is this Hudson’s Bay, she had asked, trying to put together a map of Canada from her memory, trying to explain what is apparently the ocean. Trent had mocked her for her lack of geographical sense. But she’d never seen a lake of this size. When they arrived at the ferry slip to go to the island, the lake stretched out in all directions, unbroken (except for clusters of small islets), a sheet of crinkly grey silk. There were gulls, pelicans. The wind had blown fiercely off the water, whipping her hair around. She had felt that she had travelled to a new continent, after a long ocean voyage.
Everything was new to her. She bought field guides to the local flowers and birds, the trees and the shrubs. It was all new and exotic.
She listened. She looked around. She took note.
Trent’s family told stories — illustrated by an album of black-and-white photographs — of the building of the big house, which entailed trucking beams and planking as well as the logs for the walls over the lake in winter, when it was frozen solid, and then raising the house in spring. Trent isn’t present, in these photos. His father is a young boy.
The house is huge and airy, with a post and beam structure, which makes it like a rustic cathedral, with the great beams rising to a star point. The log walls, finished with drywall and plaster on the inside, are hung with real paintings, not prints; stone and wood floors, deep wooden doors and sills, fireplaces, fat leather sofas, rugs and blankets. Outside is a landscape of moss and even little flowers that have grown in the chinks.
The village is small and strange: It’s not at all like the villages she grew up in. She can’t place what’s different about it. Maybe better kept up? There’s a hairdresser, a grocery store, a bakery, a liquor store, a few general-purpose shops that sell household goods and clothing and toys and souvenirs, as you’d expect. But she can never orient herself in the village, or find her way easily to any of the shops.
She sees that Trent’s nephews and nieces have rituals around going to the village: an ice cream shop they must visit, all together, on the first day, and whose menu they notice minute changes to. They can, it seems, enumerate all of the first-day ice cream treats from successive summers at the lake. They know, also, the history and succession of the buildings in the village, in the form of personal history. (There’s the Laundromat, where John fell asleep in a basket of clean towels and we didn’t find him for three hours.) Trent’s siblings and his parents have similar, longer histories, and these are brought out and recounted, yearly, it seems, during the family barbecues. This year, Olivia recognizes some of the places in the village, and Cleo sees that they will become part of Olivia’s history, her sense of who she is.
Then the family: Contrary to Cleo’s expectations, and impressions of teenagers from her own experience, Trent’s nephews and niece are lovely human beings: polite, respectful, able to engage in conversation with adults, happy to play with and amuse Olivia and Sam. She sees that the teenaged cousins will have very different lives than she has had — that they will walk into university, careers, on paths carefully cleared and groomed for them by their parents. There is already mention of the accomplishments of the older ones, who are at university, who have summer jobs that are more interesting and relevant, Cleo thinks, than the jobs usually available to students, and who drive up sometimes, on the weekends, with or without friends, to be hugged and admired and served.
They are all handsome, healthy, bright, self-confident young people. They are not, she thinks, outstandingly bright or accomplished, but they do excellently, or at least very well.
She thinks: If I and my siblings had had their opportunities. When she tries to say this to Trent, he’s annoyed with her, interprets her comments as crass, envious. Which perhaps they are.
Here at the lake, Cleo may, for the only time all year, find herself divested of children for long periods of time. Olivia and Sam are carted around by careful, affectionate, solicitous cousins, uncles and aunts, grandparents. Some mornings she wakes up to find the sun shining, the two bedrooms she and Trent share with the children empty, and Olivia’s and Sam’s voices distant in the kitchen, happily chattering to their grandmother. She is encouraged to put her feet up, have a drink, read novels or magazines. When she helps make a salad for dinner, or washes the dishes, she is thanked and praised extravagantly. She and Trent walk to the village, hand in hand, for ice cream. Trent takes her out in the canoe.
She has learned, since, that their trips to the cottage are a kind of bubble in which normal life is suspended, but the first visit, when she hadn’t known Trent well, had been dating him only a few months, she had fallen under some sort of enchantment of privilege and lack of responsibility. For the first time in her life, perhaps, there had been nothing that she should be doing.
Now she does not have as much freedom, but is still relatively cocooned. She sits on the beach, watching Sam, who’s at an age at which he has to be watched closely near water, and watching Olivia a little less closely. Olivia must wear water wings, but she paddles and dives under with a fair bit of control, of confidence, Cleo can see. She does not panic, if she loses sight of Olivia’s purple bathing suit, her neon-orange water wings, for a few moments, in the crowd of children in the water. (There she is, on her cousin Harry’s back, having a dolphin ride. Not floating under the surface, caught in weed, lost and gone forever.)
The teenaged cousins spend the afternoons at the beach, too. They helpfully, politely, carry some of Cleo’s gear: the beach blanket, the large basket of plastic pails and spades and sifters, the hats and towels and sunscreen and diaper bag with its bottles of juice. They lay out Cleo’s stuff in the sand, and then lie a little distance off, marinating. They talk among themselves, in the secret talk of adolescents. They build sand castles with Olivia and let her bury them in the sand and give her rides on their inner tubes and take her across to the beach store to buy popsicles. Olivia is in heaven.
Sam likes the beach less. He cries when sand sticks to his fingers. He curls his toes, draws his legs upward, when Cleo tries to dip him in the water. He cries if one of the cousins comes out of the water and picks him up wet. He wants to sit on Cleo’s lap, not on the blanket, which gets sandy and wet. But if she opens a book, if she closes her eyes, Sam might run away at warp speed, toward the water, under the dock, even in the direction of the playground, at the other end of the beach, across a strip of sunbathing and picnicking families.
No, he wouldn’t. He will only sit in the sand within her arm’s reach, and cry with irritation. Sam won’t desert her, as Olivia has, for the glamour of the cousins and the ice cream parlour.
WON’T YOU PUT JAM on that toast? Gwendolyn says.
No, Cleo says. Sam’s happy to eat it without jam.
But it would taste better with.
He doesn’t need it, though. I don’t want him to need sweets.
A little sugar won’t hurt you, Trent says. That’s all a myth, all of that stuff about sugar. A little sugar doesn’t hurt.
Yes, she says, but why develop Sam’s taste for sweet things? That isn’t healthy.
She must have spoken in too sharp a tone, because Trent’s voice becomes impatient. I didn’t want to start an argument. I just don’t believe in being nutty about food.
Gwendolyn has retreated to the kitchen, not in an unfriendly way, Cleo thinks: just deciding that discretion is the better part of valour. By “nutty” Trent means someone like Mandalay, who is sometimes vegetarian, who thinks that hot dogs cause cancer, that milk is full of hormones and antibiotics. Cleo is certainly not nutty. She grew up with nutty; she knows what nutty is.
Gwendolyn says, Those little canvas shoes are so cute. When my kids were young, we put them in laced-up leather boots, so their feet would develop straight.
Cleo says, No need for that; their feet will develop naturally, without shoes. Hum
ans haven’t worn shoes for most of our history. She says this with more confidence than she feels, and isn’t really even sure if this is true.
But won’t their feet turn inward, or their arches not develop? Gwendolyn says.
Cleo is struck with fear. Perhaps they will? Sam’s little feet are still unformed, fat little pads. Olivia’s look fine, but now that she comes to think of it, don’t Olivia’s ankles lean toward each other, a bit?
Olivia’s such a thin little kid, Gwendolyn says. James and Bob Junior were both thirty pounds on their first birthdays.
Olivia and Sam weren’t twenty pounds on their first birthdays, Cleo knows. Sam was a pudgy baby, but now that he’s walking, he’s getting lean, like Olivia.
Trent’s mom has given them two rooms, one with a double bed, one with a single and a crib. Cleo takes the second one, so that she can get up with Sam in the night. He still wakes up, needs to be comforted. It would almost be easier if she were still nursing him. But Olivia won’t go to bed without Trent or Cleo lying down with her, anyway.
Bob would never have liked me sleeping in a separate bed, Gwendolyn says. Also: My children all slept through the night by the time they were three months old.
In the evenings, she often lies down between both of the children, until they fall asleep, then moves Sam to the crib and reads in the bed beside him.
Don’t you watch sports at all? Gwendolyn asks.
No.
And you don’t like movies.
I like movies. We don’t often get out.
Oh, you have to get out, Lou — Trent’s brother-in-law — says, kindly, warmly. He’s nice to her; he remembers to try to draw her out. A big man, broad rather than lanky like Trent’s family. He’s smoking the fattest cigar she’s ever seen, though, and she has to turn her head sometimes for air.
If you want to keep your marriage, he says, you have to get out together.
Probably true.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 17
