by Camilla Gibb
“You lezzies just about done in there?” Ruthie says, knocking on the door. “D’you forget this is a communal bathroom?”
Nina toasts Emma as quietly as possible with the rim of her wineglass. Passes her the soap. “You reek of bleach,” she says. “Hurry up. The old man’s waiting.”
They have a ritual now, the three of them. On Saturday nights, Emma and Nina get cleaned up after a day in the lab and join Professor Savage back at his old house on Markham Street. They share a bottle of wine while they wash the week’s dishes in his kitchen, and when the kitchen is clean, they cook for him.
“Nothing too fancy, now,” he calls from the sofa in the living room, although he’s mentioned more than once today that he wouldn’t mind a little portobello mushroom sauce with his steak. That’s Nina’s fault. She buys expensive and exotic vegetables at Longos and tells him organic is better for his sperm count. He finds that very convincing and often asks for a second helping of arugula.
Nina and Professor Savage swap stories about various wars—so convincing you’d think she’d lived through the whole century. They are stories passed down to her from her grandpa, a man whose wife only married him because he promised her he’d buy her a refrigerator. “What do I want with a useless ring?” she had apparently said when he appeared at her parents’ doorstep on bent knee. “Offer me one of those newfangled appliances, though, and I’ll say ‘I do’ faster than you can say ‘Spit’!”
She got the fridge before she got electricity. When electricity arrived in their part of the country, she thought it must be a sign of the Second Coming. She believed the fridge had the power of granting eternal life: hence the five-year-old butter, which Nina still fondly remembers as something like Stilton for country hicks.
Emma is determined to have the emu standing for the Christmas party. She wishes it could wear a tux and pass around a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Nina’s welded a stand for the bird, measured it perfectly, so all that remains is to lift the entire thing off the table and lower it down gently into its cradle—its manger, Emma wants to call it. She lets Nina and Professor Savage do the honours while she stands back and watches, her hands covering her heart in her mouth. She holds her breath. They count to three, lift the bird slightly, and suddenly, there she is, winged and upright, flying for a moment, bounding across the outback, smiling, and then coming back down to earth to land in her manger. As soon as her bones touch the metal stand, Emma lets out a huge sigh and bursts into tears.
“Honey!” says Nina, her face a collage of pride and compassion.
“Oh!” says Professor Savage, not knowing what to do, not understanding girls and why they always cry at moments like this. “My dear. It’s okay. It’s perfectly intact. It’s … beautiful, Emma.”
She continues sobbing and Professor Savage reaches into his pocket for an ink-stained handkerchief. “You’ll have to come and get it, dear,” he says, one hand still on the emu’s neck.
Emma laughs and reaches out to take it. Nina is adjusting the emu’s spine, balancing it’s wings. “It is so beautiful,” she says, standing back. “You did it, Emma. You really did it.”
Emma can’t quite believe it’s true. She did do it. “Look at that,” she says, pointing at her bird and laughing.
Professor Savage shuffles off to the corner of the room and Nina kisses Emma with all the pride of someone who completely understands what it is to take the risk of creating something life-like out of the discarded and forgotten.
A flood of things comes clattering out of a cupboard as Professor Savage yanks so hard at a door that he pulls it off its rusting hinges.
“Melville? Are you okay?” Emma asks, separating herself from Nina.
“I’m all right,” he declares, wiping a shower of dust off his front. “There it is,” he says, bending down with a hand on his knee for support. “My wee box of Christmas decorations,” he says, standing up, one hand against his back, one holding a flowered hat box. He throws off the lid and extracts a tiny wreath made of pine cones.
He carries it across the room in his outstretched hands and stands in front of Emma’s bird. “I crown thee, queen of the emus.” He pats the pine cones down onto the bird’s skull.
The day of the Christmas party, Nina’s sculpture—distinct, yet familiar—stands tall and beautiful beside Emma’s emu. Nina’s is more whimsical—“I can only parody real life, I can’t recreate it like you,” she says to Emma. From between its legs hang six ostrich eggs painted gold, strung on a thin piece of fishing line. She and Emma plant a seventh golden egg inside the rib cage of the bird of bones.
They put votive candles on the heads of the raccoons and pythons for the Christmas party. It is a small and special occasion in the hallowed lab room. Former students and favourite colleagues stand around Professor Savage as he stirs mulled wine in the copper bathtub with a yardstick. Emma has to refrain from making jokes about the non-yuletide uses of the tub.
The emu is the object of considerable attention. “That’s a remarkable specimen, Melville,” says a lisping forensic anthropologist. Professor Savage points at Emma, with pride in his gesture. “Tell that to its creator,” he says. She blushes and the forensic anthropologist walks over and takes her by the elbow and leads her to the bird to engage her in a discussion about the particular challenges of reconstructing a bird of this size.
Emma surprises herself with her revelation of details, her exacting osteological comparison between the emu and the ostrich.
“Any interest in dinosaurs?” the lisping professor asks.
“Lifelong,” she has to admit.
“You’re well prepared,” he says, commending her.
In the slightly drunken headiness of it all, Emma excuses herself for a moment. She wants to call Blue. She’s not exactly sure what to say: “I built an emu” doesn’t really capture it.
She’s thrown off course by the sound of him, though. He doesn’t sound right to her. His words make sense but his tone rings false, almost menacing. “I’m close to the source, Emma, I can feel it,” he says cryptically, allowing Amy to translate.
“Guy at the Salvation Army says someone matching your father’s description came in for dinner yesterday,” Amy explains. “Shoved chicken and potatoes into the pocket of his coat and stumbled out of there. The guy wasn’t a regular, but apparently that’s nothing to go on because the Christmas season isn’t exactly a regular time.”
Indeed. It’s a premature thaw that brings comatose flies to life for an afternoon.
Even if it is Oliver, Emma thinks, does Blue really want to see him leaving the Salvation Army with mashed potatoes in his pocket saying, “I was just going to put this on my Visa?”
“They’re gonna contact us if he comes in again,” says Blue.
“Do you think he’s being realistic?” Emma asks Amy later.
“About what?”
“About the possibility that this guy might be our father?”
“It’s unlikely.”
“And besides, what would he do if it was?”
“Don’t know. One moment I think he just wants to know that he’s alive and the next, I think he wants to blast the guy. He’d probably just give him fifty bucks and tell him to buy himself some new clothes and that would be about it. He just wants it to be over. He needs to say goodbye.”
“He’s just setting himself up for more heartbreak. He’s searching for something he’s never going to find.”
“Maybe it’s the search that he needs more than the finding,” Amy says, considering.
“Maybe,” Emma can’t help but agree.
“To know that he tried his best,” Amy adds.
“But he did that a long time ago,” Emma says.
Christmas
It’s a relief to be spending Christmas with Nina this year rather than going through the charade of festivity that is usually Christmas. Last year, Elaine got too drunk to remember to put the turkey in the oven. Emma and Blue had stuffed it in at dusk and incinerated it
within the hour.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Nina says. “Christ. You should have seen my mother last year. Scott and I pulled up to the house and she was standing on the porch waiting for us in this getup like she was a nineteen-fifties film star at cocktail hour on holiday in the Caribbean. It was like, minus twenty, and she was wearing this sleeveless yellow muumuu thing and drinking a martini. Scott told her she looked like a drag queen. It could only get worse from there.”
“So did it?”
“Big time. First, there’s always the issue of her getting drunk and saying she used to be a Rockette—she’s always screaming, ‘Look at these legs, damn it!’ And then she’s always telling me I look scruffy and am never going to get a man and it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m a lesbian—she knows perfectly well that I am—she still always says these things—‘A little lipstick wouldn’t go amiss.’ And then, Christ, Scott’s dog tries to hump her leg and Fred skulks around like a creep, and then my sister shows up—and she’s a born-again Christian—with her husband and their three kids, and then there are just way too many people and way too much going on and we all have to sit down and open presents. Fred always gives me some kind of stuffed animal—I mean an animal he’s stuffed—and my mother has a complete fit because she can’t stand ‘those things’ in the house and the kids start bawling and she just gets more and more hammered and then she starts crying and invariably ends up completely missing the big meal we’ve spent way too much time and effort planning. It’s always a fucking mess.”
“Why do we bother?” Emma sighs.
“Because we keep hoping. We keep hoping it’s going to change.”
“I guess you’re right,” says Emma. It’s just part of the contract of being born and related. You don’t choose your family, it’s true, but you can’t really choose to unchoose them either, no matter how much you might want to do so in your head. Even when you haven’t seen them in years. Even when most of your memories are of being insulted and criticized. Even when you know they must be homeless, insane, dead, or possibly some combination of all three.
Her father may well have spent Christmas Day alone in some gutter, without a sweater to keep him warm. Might have spent the last few Christmases like this. Dirty and decrepit, with a tangled mass of hair full of nesting earthworms and nuts squirrels have buried there for winter.
Are you still here, Dad? she wonders. Do you even care if you are? I think Blue does, even if you don’t, and I can’t any longer.
Out of necessity, it seems, she has chosen to stop worrying, but she will always harbour the fantasy that had they lived some other life, he would have offered her pearls of wisdom, walked her up the aisle, said to someone, “Take good care of my daughter,” and handed Blue the responsibility of running the family business. In another life, Oliver would have retired, received a pension, taken up oil painting, and grown into an old and kindly man adored by his grandchildren. There would have been grandchildren, instead of children who change their names and reconstruct dead animals rather than perpetuate lineages.
The problem with never having had something, though, is that you dream it in its most conventional and clichéd sense. You ingest the romance portrayed in movies and long for chance, albeit Brief Encounters in train stations, meetings that will change your life forever. In truth, given the choice, we are too afraid to let our lives change forever, however brief, wherever the station. But Emma and Blue haven’t been given a choice. Their lives are about to change forever, whether they know it or not.
Emma and Nina spend the day before Christmas on a snowmobile. It feels nearly holy to float on white with your arms wrapped around your lover’s waist. All these hidden talents, Emma thinks of Nina, as they fly off a small hill and land in a dip with a thud, and then a rev, a rip, and another rise, and they are flying again. Everything you discover in another: every day the person in front of you becomes bigger, and rounder, fills the holes in you with things that are different, unexpected. Not only does Nina know how to drive this thing, she knows the trails through the trees. She sight-reads vast and endless fields of white without hesitation and they shriek as they fly under a heavy dark winter sky.
Emma tries driving. Cautiously at first, but it quickly comes to feel safe, solid and easy, as Nina grips her thighs. Emma turns sharply and they lean into the ground as the skidoo slides out from underneath them and they skate across ice on their backs. Neither of them can stop laughing—they are on the edge of a frozen lake, sheer ice, fun and danger.
They drive back to Nina’s apartment in Blue’s truck, Emma’s head in Nina’s lap the whole way, Nina trying to get Emma to join her in botching up the words of various Christmas carols.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
“Nothing,” Emma says. “At least I don’t think so. A little preoccupied maybe. It’s just a little disconcerting being apart from Blue. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I hope he’s okay.”
“He’s doing what he needs to do, Emma. And he’s got Amy with him. And she is really solid.”
Solid, yes, but strong enough? He’s got storm written all over him. It’s not her job, or anyone’s, to predict his weather, to batten down the hatches, see everyone else has cover.
There’s no answer at the apartment in Vancouver, but Amy calls a couple of hours later. “Merry Christmas, big sister,” she slurs. “We’re all a little fucking wasted.”
Emma can hear the music blasting in the background. “Where the hell are you?” she asks.
“Bar,” Amy burps. “Here’s your brother,” she says, passing him the phone and crashing off her bar stool.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey back. So, you having a good Christmas?”
“Guess so. I went by the Salvation Army again.”
“Any luck?”
“Nah. Guy didn’t come back,” Blue says offhandedly.
“Blue, I don’t know if you should get your hopes up,” Emma says. “It’s not very likely that the guy is Dad. So they saw a six-foot balding homeless guy with a Scottish accent. Could be anybody.”
“I showed them the picture, Emma,” he says, a little irritated.
“Right,” she says, but without any enthusiasm in her voice.
“You could at least be a little supportive,” he says angrily. “I mean, I’m doing this for both of us.”
“Are you, Blue?” she snaps.
“Well, he’s your fuckin’ father too.”
“But you’ve never even asked me if I want to see him again. You’ve never even asked me how I feel.”
“Well, you don’t know how I feel.”
“You know what, Blue? You know what I think? I think, So what. We’re adults now. We can make choices about who we have in our lives. I just mean that as much as I might miss him, he really brought us nothing but misery. We don’t owe him anything.”
“What the fuck do you know about misery? At least the guy didn’t use you as a punching bag.”
“What am I supposed to do, Blue?” she says defensively. “Okay, so he hurt you more than he hurt me. Is that what you want to hear? Do you want me to say I’m sorry? To say I’m grateful you took it instead of me?”
Blue smacks his bottle against the bar then. “Fuck you!” he yells into the receiver and slams the phone down.
Two thousand miles away, Emma can hear the bar fall silent. The bartender approaches and tells Blue to put the bottle down. “Time to go, buddy,” he says.
“Fuck off,” Blue says, shrugging a hand off his shoulder. “I was just going.”
Amy sits there with her forehead in her hand and shakes her head.
“You coming with me?” Blue shouts.
“No,” she says quietly.
“No?” he says, looking at her intensely.
“No,” Amy repeats.
“Well, you can just fuck off too then! You can all just fuck off!” He shouts and storms out of the bar.
Amy puts her forehead down against the bar. She rolls on
to her cheek and reaches up and sticks her finger in her drink and fishes for an ice cube. Scoops it out and places it against her eyelid. Water trickles down her face. I give up, she thinks. I give up.
Deliverance
When Blue leaves Frank’s Bar that night, he’s ready to kill. His fucking sister. He’s spent his whole life trying to protect her and she turns on him. The only reason he is here is to find their father and put an end to it all. To put an end to the ever-present threat that lingers when you know a man who despises you is still hiding somewhere on the planet—so close sometimes that it’s as if he’s in your head. You cannot rest. You live in absolute terror that he will reappear at some unexpected moment with a broom handle or a machete to mutilate and murder you. It’s only a matter of time.
Being alive is like standing in a cornfield in summer during the middle of a war. There is nothing but the empty row in front of you, but you know there are a million armed soldiers hidden and waiting to attack. The threat surrounds you even though you cannot see it.
You live like that until you can stand it no longer and you decide to pick up a gun and engage in war where you are finally on the offensive. By then you know where your enemy is. Winter has come and he is just one armed soldier in full view in front of you. He is only one man, not an army. In summer’s cornfield, even if you kill one soldier, you know the others are out to get you and you can feel them encroaching, like swarms of ants from every side. In the armed winter, you can aim straight and kill your enemy and know then that you are safe. Although you have to live with the sickness that you have caused injury, you at least have the assurance that he was a lone gunman and he is now dead.
Blue’s got his hand on his pocket and he’s walking toward the Salvation Army. “It’s your lucky day,” the guy at the door says, recognizing him. “Your man’s just hobbled in here for dinner.”
There is a train of men standing in line, gripping trays in grubby hands. Blue squints and sees him—a bearded man in a grey hat stooped over a tray.
