by Alan Cumyn
“We won’t lose that,” he said in a soft, gentle voice, in precisely the right words and way, now that she’d given him the clue. That’s what maturity gets you, he thought. She was about to offer herself – she might not even know it, but he knew it, and he knew enough to stay back on the bed, to appear the reluctant one, Mr. Responsible. He felt a speech coming on. “Sometimes,” he said confidingly, “souls – if you believe in that sort of thing – just connect, naturally, on myriad different levels. You recognize it in a glance across a crowded room, a first touch of the hand, an innocent remark. What is it? I don’t think anybody really knows, and a lot of people ignore it, they stop looking for it.” He paused. He felt strangely dizzy, caught up in his own words, perhaps, in anticipation. He took a deep, clearing breath. He felt deeply conscious of the fact that he was still wearing the portable vagina. “That knowledge withers,” he continued. “It can be best that way. If you can dull yourself, just focus on the day-to-day, much better than being open to the ravages of an extraordinary love.”
Tears were now welling in her eyes. “Oh, I knew -” she began to say.
“Shhhh.” She was going to throw herself at him. He could almost count it down. He stood, not swiftly, not slowly, not as a motion towards her but towards the bathroom. The floor was not as steady as it should have been. “There’s a great, great deal more we need to talk about,” he said humbly, and he held up his finger, a simple gesture of restraint. “Back in a moment.” Then he stepped heavily into the bathroom, locked the door as silently as he could, flicked the switch, recoiled from the nauseating brightness. He breathed deeply, steadied himself, undid his trousers deliberately, not rushing, unhooked the vagina and looked to see where he might hide the thing. He didn’t want to feel anxious, yet the room was slowly spinning. Then – and it was cruelly sudden and unexpected, overwhelming – he began to empty his stomach, as quietly as he could, into the toilet. He tried to be silent, to be neat and controlled, but the heaving was riotous, unruly, rude. Everything had to go, not just the Scotch but the filet mignon and mushrooms and red wine, the other drinks from earlier in the day, even parts of lunch and breakfast. He could taste certain undigested bits as they rushed past the wrong way. His body was left in a cold, trembling sweat.
Ages later there was a little voice at the bathroom door. “Bob? Are you all right? Professor Sterling?”
“Ghnihhr,” Bob said. He wheezed a couple of times, ran warm water in the sink, and wiped his face in the dark with a cloth.
“Can I help?”
“No,” Bob said weakly. “No. I’m sorry.” He ran more water.
Still later came a click of the door and she was gone. Bob cleaned himself up, took off everything, wandered out of the bathroom and fell back into bed. He meant to call her right away. In his mind he was up and dialling the number. The phone was ringing in his ear. “Sienna,” he was saying. “I’m sorry.” In his mind. But his body stayed on the bed and he slept, badly, the rest of the night.
10
Julia’s head was splitting. Little cracks were spreading along the base in the back, and one major rift gaped down the front between her eyebrows to the bridge of her nose, a ragged wound of pure pain that nonetheless left her free to sit, very still, by the telephone and talk to the executive director at Fallowfields. Mrs. Watkins was breathless with concern and apology – Fallowfields had never had a patient go missing before, not from the secure wing. But there was positive news: the police had interviewed a bus driver who had picked up Mrs. Carmichael close to Fallowfields and had let her off near the park at Hog’s Back Falls at 2:49 p.m. A dozen off-duty Fallowfields staff were that instant helping police personnel search the park, and Mrs. Watkins was expecting to hear good news any moment.
“Hog’s Back Falls!” Julia said. “My God, she’s fallen in the water!”
“We cannot assume the worst, Mrs. Sterling,” Mrs. Watkins said gravely.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Julia said when she got off the phone. Donny was in the den playing with Matthew, who hadn’t been changed in hours and should have been cranky with starvation but seemed entranced with his new friend. All the things to do at once, faster than at once, lined up in Julia’s mind: change and feed Matthew, feed herself, take some pain pills, drive to Hog’s Back, find her mother’s dead body in the freezing, violent water.
They were in the van in under six minutes. Donny drove. There was no question about whether he wanted to continue to be part of this domestic drama, it was simply the way it had to be. With her head like this Julia couldn’t drive. She could have called for a cab; she could have called any one of a dozen friends scattered in different parts of the city; she could have spent half an hour or more trying to arrange a babysitter. But Donny was the nearest and quickest help and she had switched into vital-efficiency mode. Her mother might be dying. Any extra minute could be the difference.
She closed her eyes and held her temples in the van, gently rubbed the base of her skull, the top, and along the sides. More food might have helped, but the fault was hers, she’d left things too long. Matthew was quiet in the back in his baby seat. Donny was talking but his voice sounded like elevator music, something that didn’t need to be paid attention to. He was naming people from Brookfield and what had become of them. Some Julia recognized, most she couldn’t or didn’t want to remember.
“You could go faster,” she said without opening her eyes. As soon as she said it he speeded up drastically. “Just don’t get us killed,” she said and he instantly slowed down again.
“Do you remember Ray Jenkins? You won’t believe this. He sold his little Internet company for three hundred million dollars. Can you believe that? Just before the crash. Where did I hear that? I ran into someone a month or two ago. Oh yeah, Willy Leach. Do you remember Willy? …”
Fading in and out. A gentle voice, just by itself it seemed to be mending some of the lesser cracks in her skull. Despite herself she thought of Ray Jenkins, with his scientific calculator in his shirt pocket, the bad acne and greasy hair, the way he couldn’t look any girl in the eye. At least not Julia. There’d been a whole squadron of Ray Jenkinses who would start to sweat when Julia walked by. She used to take slight pleasure in their discomfort. Mostly they were annoying, not worth thinking about.
Donny had been like that too. She was beginning to remember him: a shy, thin, nervous boy behind her, all elbows and ears. Now here he was driving her to Hog’s Back, where they were going to find her mother’s body face down in the shallows below the falls, her legs drifting lifelessly, her eyes open and tortured, little bits of reed and river filth in her hair.
Police cars huddled at the entrance to the park, their doors open, lights flashing. No ambulances. Julia’s heart sank then rose again. No ambulances meant she hadn’t yet been found, but also that she wasn’t dead yet. There was still hope.
“I’ll carry Matthew,” Donny said but Julia countermanded him. It would have taken extra energy to explain, so she didn’t. But she had to carry Matthew herself. Julia had a front-loading strap-on baby carrier that she hadn’t used for Matthew since he was much younger, but she fit him in now, wrapped her coat around him.
“Want to see!” Matthew said but Julia said “No!” in her new way that Matthew seemed to understand really did mean no: no way, absolutely not, impossible. You are not going to see your grandmother’s twisted, bloated, drowned body caught in the mud and rocks.
“I’m the mother!” Julia announced when she walked up to the nearest officer, then corrected herself. “She’s my mother!” she said. “I mean I’m the daughter. It’s my mother who’s lost.”
“We’re not sure, ma’am, that she’s actually here,” the officer said. He was enormous, his holster, boots, and truncheon bar gleaming black in the headlights, his bulletproof vest a duller, heavier black. “We’re cordoning and searching the trails and the surrounding bush,” he said. “They feed into the river, but we don’t think she’s there. We’ve already had a team go up a
nd back and the view is pretty open for the most part.” He had a fat head and small, dark eyes, and either didn’t know what he was talking about or was trying to spare her feelings: she knew exactly where they were going to find her mother. She knew too, suddenly, with a certainty that seemed to swell from her cells and tissue, that she would be the one to find her, that it would be gruesome and inevitable.
“If you’d like to stay here, ma’am, I’m in radio contact with all the search teams,” the officer said.
“No,” Julia said without hesitation. “I have to do this.” She thought, but didn’t add, that otherwise they might be there all night. This was her duty. It was unavoidable, just as she had to carry Matthew, which was part of her punishment. She took the flashlight that Donny silently offered and strode down the trail that led directly to the falls, which she could hear roaring somewhere in the black. That’s where her mother would have gone, the quickest route to disaster. The ground was muddy and wet. With Matthew on her front she felt pregnant again, heavy and earthbound. Every step sank into the dirt. The light from her flashlight carved dim tunnels out of the night, which wasn’t as black as it could have been, she thought, would have seemed greyish without the artificial light to keep their eyes from fully adjusting. She could see other beams in the woods, could hear the teams calling for her mother. Behind her, Donny was scanning his flashlight back and forth, checking the bushes which loomed so suddenly in the blank light.
Useless, she thought, but she didn’t tell him to stop.
There was no point going to the falls themselves, a body would be quickly carried downstream by the violent pull of the current. There was a safety fence, but Julia knew her mother would have found a way around it – she’d gotten out of Fallowfields, hadn’t she? She’d probably crossed the bridge on Hog’s Back Road, paused to look down at the roiling fury, then had fallen over right there just from the awful pull of it. From this angle down below Julia could see the jutting grey cliffs, the hump of rock in the middle of the maelstrom, the swirling, foaming, roaring tonnage of falling water.
“Scared!” Matthew said.
“No, you’re not,” Julia snapped.
“Yes, scared!”
“Just go to sleep!” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. He started to whimper. “Shhh!”
“I can hold him,” Donny said, but Julia refused again. She couldn’t possibly entrust him to anyone else tonight. Then it occurred to her that she’d forgotten about her headache, but with the thought it came surging back.
“Slow down!” Donny said, but what was the point of that? They were only postponing the inevitable. Her head would just burn, burn from the inside, become completely unbearable. Better get it done now. “We might miss her!” he said, farther behind than before. He could look back in the bushes, uncover every twig if he wanted.
There was the water now, calmer, almost subdued at the base of the falls. She turned off her flashlight, weak as it was. Better to let her eyes adjust, watch the black water turn grey, the sky lighten to dark blue, purple. Shadows of trees, the murmuring of the ripples. In many spots here the river wasn’t more than a few inches deep. But her mother still would have found a way to drown. This Julia knew: it was the final punishment for selling the house and moving her, for not taking her in herself. This horrible death, with no doubt about who was responsible.
“Do you see her?” Donny asked, coming up from behind. He shone his flashlight up and down the river. The light beam reduced the field of vision considerably. Everything outside of it disappeared in black.
“She’s here. I know it!” Julia said.
She waded into the water. It was frightfully cold. Her running shoes were soaked and frigid in an instant. She let out a harsh breath then kept going. It had to be done. You carry the child, let it take over your body for nine months, then you have to squeeze him out. There’s no other way, either you do it or you die, or you let some doctor cut it out of you like a tumour or a stone. You don’t think your legs can spread wide enough, you feel like it’s going to rip you from your vagina to your throat, but you do it. Drugs help but it’s still impossible and yet must be done. Like this. One step after another, slimy rock and silty bottom. You cannot fall; your child is strapped on; you’re walking for two.
“Do you see something?”
Julia took a step, balanced on a small rock, then took another step and sank down to her knee. There were even deeper sections. That’s where her mother would be, she thought. Dragged under by the current, her twisted body. A rock wobbled and Julia nearly went over. She fought upright, drenched the other leg in stretching for a more stable perch.
“What do you see?”
Something silver in the water. A hand? Julia bent over, so carefully, with Matthew’s enormous weight on her front. It would be so easy to fall over. She could feel her back resisting, complaining. A hand? No. Something else. Not a body part. Julia was relieved and disappointed. It could just be a tin can. Deeper than it looked; she had to lean and hold herself back at the same time. Her knee buckled slightly but held. The water was screaming cold on her arm but she stayed silent, the way she had in the hospital with Matthew. What’s the point in yelling? You have to go through it. It’s a debt that must be paid.
“What did you find?” Donny asked, shining his light, temporarily blinding her.
She started screaming then. It came from her bones and shook the night.
“What? What is it?” Donny yelled.
“It’s the ricer!” she wailed, waving it around, unmistakable proof. “My God, oh my God, it’s my mother’s ricer!”
There were blankets on the shore and searchlights, men wading in the frigid waters, poking with sticks, police dogs sniffing up and down the shore. It was out of Julia’s hands. She was wailing now, inconsolable. She shook with cold and fright and exhaustion, with hunger and fear and the dread of night. The big officer stayed with her and patted her shaking, huddled body from time to time. At any moment the men with the sticks were going to pull up her mother’s body. It was going to be black with muck, lifeless. The sight would sear itself into Julia’s soul. She’d been entrusted with her mother’s care and had sloughed it off to incompetents in order to save money.
Why hadn’t she spent more time observing the security precautions at Fallowfields? One afternoon’s visit was hardly enough. She could’ve asked for references and followed up, phoned the relatives of some of their other residents. She was a researcher, it wouldn’t have been too difficult. A little effort, some imagination, and all this would have been avoided. What a pitiful dishrag she’d turned into: one small child and her world had sunk into mush. She pictured her mother wandering stupidly, blindly, all alone on the bridge, mesmerized by the pull of falls, no one around to hear her screams. In the middle of the city, in the middle of the day! Losing her balance, falling over, slamming her head on a rock on the way down and then the merciless current rolling her light frame, her fading little body, sweeping it away in slow motion while no one helped.
What had Julia been doing? Taking forever to get Matthew ready to go out. Planning her kitchen renovations! She retched suddenly but nothing came up; there was almost nothing in her stomach.
Julia heard a commotion in the distance – dogs barking, men yelling – but she couldn’t look. It was the body. They’d talked about this very thing countless times over the years, that strangely serious though mocking tone that her mother would adopt whenever they passed by a feeble, wretched old soul. “You will not let that happen to me. I’m telling you now, if I’m drooling in bed and muttering, you have my permission to take me in the backyard and shoot me. Just bury me in the back garden by the rosebush. Not the rhubarb, I don’t want you making jam out of me later on!” Smiling at her little joke, at the way Julia couldn’t figure out whether to take her seriously.
“Ma’am?” the big officer said. “Mrs. Sterling?”
“There’s your father’s shotgun, he taught you to use it for a reason. If I’m ever moan
ing about my lost knitting like Mrs. Abelnorth, if it ever comes to that, you’ll know what to do. That’s a darling. Did you write to Mrs. Henley? You should thank her for the hairbands she gave you at Christmas.”
“Mrs. Sterling!”
“Huh?”
“I just got word from one of the hospitals. A woman has brought in someone who fits your mother’s description. Pretty disoriented. Her son found her wandering around here this afternoon. Do you want to come with me to check it out?”
Julia looked at him the longest time. It was so cold!
“I think I need to stay here,” she said dully. Then suddenly, “Where’s Matthew?”
“I have him. He’s fine. Sleeping away!”
Julia looked up without comprehension, finally said, “Donny,” as if practising his name.
“You should come with me to the hospital,” the officer said again. A persistent grip on her elbow, she had to rise. But this is where they were going to find the body! What about the dogs? What had they been barking at? Julia peered into the gloom to see what the dogs were doing.
“We can come back here if it doesn’t pan out,” the officer said.
11
Julia Carmichael. Three years ago, when Waylun Zhi said to choose a personal word pattern for the microcosmic meditation – something relaxing yet powerful, full of grace, energy, redemption – the first words to leap to Donny’s mind were Julia Carmichael. He’d been standing in Waylun Zhi’s little studio in the tree-hugging position, knees bent modestly, back straight, arms rounded in front of his chest as he tried to relax, to focus inwardly, to channel the energy of the universe through his own sacred vessel.
Julia Carmichael.
The in-breath, when the energy wheel in his middle source opened like a petal to the soft heat of spring, was Julia. The out-breath, when the wheel tightened like a ball being squeezed in all directions at once, evenly, not hurried, as if wringing out all the bad energy and toxins accumulated in the body – that was Carmichael. He said the words, and although he was supposed to be standing without mind, in emptiness, he usually thought of a specific image: Julia Carmichael in tight, faded blue jeans and a velvety-soft, form-fitting purple sweater, with her dead-straight, shining blonde hair combed down her backside, standing outside the gymnasium before the Christmas term History exam, two pens and three pencils gripped lightly in her small right hand, and who gave a shit what Mr. Wilkens was going to ask anyway?
