He blinked and then the door swung open. “That’s Ivan,” he said, glancing at the door.
Before I turned, I leaned over the desk and said, “The whole point is to look at people and listen to them. The whole point of the whole thing is to not be staring at some goddamn video game.”
“Like life, you mean?”
I wondered if he put gel in his hair to make it into those little points, if he was so stupid he thought that was the kind of thing he should spend his time on, or if he was just so dirty, his hair found its own way to looking stupid.
“Like life,” I said and looked at Ivan, who crossed the room with a sigh. He was a dark-haired, heavy-set man whose features seemed to have retreated from his wide cheeks and jaw to crowd the centre of his face. His eyes were so close together they almost crossed as they stared at me.
“You need a room?” Ivan asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Ivan unhooked a key from a line of nails behind the desk and handed it to me. “Taz, get her credit card. It’s a no-smoking room. No pets either.”
Then Ivan climbed the stairs, and only after he had disappeared did I remember that I hadn’t asked him if he knew my sister. By the time I turned back around, Taz was handing me back my card. “All done. Enjoy your stay.”
I slept until past dinnertime. When I woke, I was shocked to realize I had fallen asleep right on top of the plaid bedspread. “You think they wash these for every guest?” I’d always told Stephan when we stayed at the motel by his sister’s place.
My headache had somehow gotten worse while I slept. Rubbing my temples, I stood and looked out the window at the town below. It was so small and yet I hadn’t a clue how to find her in it. I would have to ask someone—who knew how many people—till I found someone who could tell me where she was.
Exhausted at the thought, I sat back down on the bed. No one knew I was here. There wasn’t anyone to know, not really. With Stephan gone, and the only people we’d met in Toronto friends of his from work. I’d had a few friends left from the university I’d taught at in Halifax, and when we lived there we’d have dinner with them once in a while. But they weren’t the kind of friends you kept in touch with once you were gone from a place. So there was no one but Stephan to tell that he had left me.
It was thinking that that made me realize I could just as easily leave this place as stay. No one would miss me if I left. My sister, wherever she was, would have long ago stopped wondering when I’d come for her, if she ever wondered at all. The few people I’d met would be glad enough not to see me again—Annie and that boy at the desk. If I could just get a ride somehow back to Whitehorse, I could sleep away the four-day drive home and it would be as if all this had been a dream. There’d be nobody I’d even need to confess how stupid I’d been to—it would be as if I’d never come and I could resume my life as if I’d never left it.
But at the thought of turning the key in the lock of the front door of our house, I felt a chill. What life, after all, would I be resuming? I had only a part-time job teaching rudimentary grammar to Korean immigrants, and nothing to spend my days on except thinking about a long trip I’d taken to find no one and then come home again to no one.
I couldn’t stand being in the hotel room. I noticed a faint stain on the quilt by my hand or maybe just a worn spot, something that reminded me of the hundred other bodies that had slept on it, fucked on it, sat at the bottom of the worst of their godforsaken lives on it and tried to weasel out of the one thing they’d meant to do. I had to leave.
I grabbed my purse from the bedside table and hurried out the door and down the stairs. Taz didn’t look up as I passed him, and I slammed the front door behind me as I stumbled down the steps onto the street.
The sun was still high and bright overhead, and I squinted as I made my way along the sidewalk with the idea of the river in my head. I got as far as I’d gone earlier in the day, and then I turned down toward the water and kept walking. Down by the shore I could see a couple dozen people gathered, and I could hear a woman singing.
As I got closer, I could hear her voice rise and fall in the air. A guitar rang out. She hit a high note that seemed unlikely, even impossible, her voice flickering so easily all the way up there and down again.
It was music like the folk songs of my childhood. Earnest, not tired like most music I heard these days. It was some kind of love song she was playing. I could tell that from just the sound of it. How it made me think for a moment again how easy it would be to go home. How I might go about finding him, how I might ask one more time for him to stay … the other words I might use to convince him.
I crossed the last street before the river and climbed down the hill to where people were gathered in front of the woman with the guitar. She was just finishing her song when I took a seat on the grass not too far from her. I realized she was scarcely a woman at all; her face was still round and girlish and almost too large for her slightly plump but delicate frame. And then I realized that some of the words she sang weren’t English. She had light brown skin and black hair. Maybe she was Native Canadian. Or were they Inuit here?
An old man seated beside me put two fingers in his mouth and whistled when the song ended. The singer said she would take a short break. I heard again the scrape of our front door against the floorboards as he closed it behind him. The sound, still in my ears, was getting louder.
I suddenly realized that Stephan didn’t know where I was. If he were to try to reach me. I pictured my kitchen, yellow in the afternoon light. I pictured the phone on the wall, ringing.
“Mara?”
A young woman, maybe ten years younger than me, stood before me. She had a broad face and long black hair. An Indian woman—no, Inuit, I thought. The woman stared at me, and I stared back.
“You aren’t Mara,” said the woman slowly.
I was confused, and then I understood.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Mara’s my sister,” I said. “She’s my sister. You know her? You know where she is?”
There was no need for the woman to look at me with such mistrust. Like she thought I was a liar or dangerous. The woman stepped back and looked over at the singer, who was holding her guitar by the neck and leaning against the gazebo, talking to a dark-haired man. The woman reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it with her face down.
“Okay,” she said. “How come I’ve never seen you before?”
“I haven’t seen Mara since we were children. I came here to find her. Is she here? Can you tell me where to find her?”
The woman exhaled smoke in two columns through her nostrils. “Okay,” she said again. “I think you better talk to Jason.”
I felt myself get angry. “Who’s Jason? Where’s Mara?”
The woman narrowed her eyes and said, “Jason’s her son. You stay here and I’ll get him. You stay here.”
As the woman walked away, turning once to look back at me, I was suspicious. My father had not said anything about Mara having a son. Why should I have to speak to this child instead of to my sister? I was tempted to leave. Then I wondered, And go where? I thought again of my kitchen.
The singer was staring at me. The woman who’d spoken to me approached her, and I saw the singer put her hand over her sweet, pretty mouth and nod.
“Who are you,” said a man’s voice.
I turned around and saw the man who’d been talking to the singer. He was maybe in his twenties. He had dark, narrow eyes. His face was angry, but as I looked at him something loosened in his mouth and eyes.
“You aren’t her son,” I said. He was too old. He did not look like her. He was a liar.
“Ma,” he said. “Who are you. Who the hell are you,” He looked younger now than I’d thought. Maybe just twenty or even a teenager. He stepped toward me and then he was in my arms. I didn’t know who opened whose arms first.
“I told you she looked just like her,” said the first woman to the singer, who n
ow stood beside us.
As fast as he was in my arms, he was out of them. “What are you doing here,” he said. “Why’d you come here.”
“I wanted to see Mara. I wanted to see my sister.”
“I told you,” said the woman. “But older, right? And those yellowy streaks in her hair. Mara never dyed her hair.”
I spoke to the boy. “Can you take me to—”
“She’s dead,” he said and turned his back to me. “Which one of you wants to buy me a beer.”
The sweet-faced singer answered quietly, “I will. Let’s go, Jason.”
The air was hot and dry, and the sun was burning the back of my neck and the part of my hair.
“You’re a liar,” I said softly.
The boy didn’t turn around, but the woman who had brought him there watched me. “He’s telling you the truth,” she said.
“What’s his name?” I asked. “What did you say his name was?”
“It’s Jason,” said the woman. “I’m Minnie, and that’s Angel”—she pointed to the singer—”and you’d better tell us your name.”
I told them my name. Angel turned and looked up at me from the corners of her eyes and then turned her face down again. She fiddled with her hands and touched Jason’s sleeve, but he didn’t move.
“What happened to my sister?”
Minnie looked sharply at Jason.
“When did she die?”
“Don’t you get too excited. It’s been a long time now. Maybe five years she’s been gone now,” said Minnie.
“Six.”
Even Minnie flinched. She nodded at Jason, who stared fiercely at the ground, as if he’d said nothing.
“It was sudden,” Minnie said. “She didn’t have any pain.”
Jason stood up.
Suddenly his hand was in my face. I drew back, but he held his hand close, his thumb tucked into his palm, so that I could hardly see. “How many fingers am I holding up,” he said. “How many fingers.”
“Get away from me,” I said. “You’re not her son. She was so gentle.”
“How many fingers.”
“Four,” I said. “Get away from me.”
He took his hand away and looked hard at me. He was much taller than I. “How come you can see,” he said. “How come she was blind and said it was something that happened to both of you.”
I felt a hand at my waist and realized Angel was there beside me. She looked up at Jason, and he took his eyes off me to look back.
He was breathing deep and hard. “Who is she,” he said.
“It’s Mara’s sister,” said Angel. “You know she had a sister.”
“Why didn’t she come before.”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I wish she’d come sooner.”
Jason began to walk away from us.
“Jason …” called Angel.
He had this energy about him like he might suddenly stop walking and reach out and throw someone to the ground. I was trying to figure out how to leave. I was dizzy and tired. Far, far away, light was leaving my kitchen.
“I have to go,” I said. I left them standing there, and I found my way back to the hotel. I climbed upstairs to my room, which exhaled faintly sour-smelling, warm air as I opened the door. It must have been late. It must have been nighttime by then. The sun was high in the sky, and I slept in its suffocating heat.
I woke from a dream of Stephan. Immediately I was unable to remember what he’d been telling me. I knew if I moved, the dream would be lost forever, so I kept my head still on the pillow and closed my eyes, digging deep into the dark there. Reaching back for my dream. Then I heard my name again.
“Aileen?”
I hadn’t realized until I heard it again that it was the sound of my name that had woken me. And then a knock on the door.
“Aileen, are you in there?”
I stood up slowly and went to the door. Through the peephole, I saw a face I didn’t recognize looking back at me. Then I remembered her name. “What do you want, Angel?” I said through the door.
She apologized for waking me, but said Jason wanted to meet me at a bar in an hour. I didn’t answer, and she knocked again. Her face was anxious and I was tired.
“How’d you know where I was staying.”
She turned her face down. “I asked Ivan about you. There aren’t very many places open now.”
I slipped the chain lock off and turned the knob, peering at her through a crack just wide enough to rest my face between. “I don’t have a real good reason to believe that roughneck kid that can hardly string together a sentence is my sister’s son. But what I know for sure is that you aren’t anything to me.”
Her eyes watched mine for a moment and then she bobbed her head, like she’d understood something. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lied to you. I didn’t ask Ivan. I followed Jason.” The sides of her mouth turned up, but she wasn’t smiling. “He followed you here.” Then she turned away and headed down the stairs. I listened to the creaking of the steps under her feet and then I heard the front door close.
I tried to sleep again but felt smothered by the hot, airless room. “Are we that far north that it would be too many goddamn miles to drag a goddamn air conditioner?” I said out loud. The walls were so thin I thought maybe down at the front desk they would hear me.
At last, I threw on the lightest shirt I had and the only jeans I’d brought and left the hotel. I stopped at a restaurant on the way, but it was even warmer inside, so I took my sandwich to go and headed down to the river again. I passed where Angel and the others had gathered hours before, but they were gone now. The bank settled into rock and then to river. It was not such a steep walk down to the blue moving water. It looked so cool and fresh. I slipped my shoes off and stepped carefully down the rocks. I reached a foot into the river.
I’d never felt anything so cold in my life. It burned through me and I burst out laughing. I could hardly feel my foot and would not have been surprised to see it bobbing out to sea. I felt awake.
It was astonishing how swiftly my whole body was cooled by a moment’s submersion of one part of it in the chill water. Now I felt more sure that the sun was lower than it had been and that the air was loosening its hold on the day’s heat. I crouched down onto the rock and then spread both legs out and plunged each foot into the water.
Again I laughed.
And then I reached my hands into the water, so that I nearly fell in.
I was no longer young. I was, I supposed, middle-aged. And I’d been an only child for six years and had not known it. And now I knew.
My hands burned and my feet burned and I thought my heart would stop. Stepping out of the water, I rubbed my hands and feet till the blood flow returned to them. Then I put on my shoes and walked back up the hill. Mara was so frightened of water. In that moment I could remember as closely as if my sister’s damp, relentless hand was still in mine, how she had cried when our father taught us to swim.
I wasn’t surprised when I saw Angel sitting there, beside the road, watching me and playing her guitar.
“You followed me again?” I asked.
“It was Jason who—”
“I know,” I said, and she went back to her song. I couldn’t figure out how I hadn’t been able to hear her singing all the time, her voice was so clear now. I told her I was sorry and she nodded.
“We’re late,” she said, putting her guitar away and it made a soft thrum of sound, knocking against the case.
The bar was called The Pit and it was a good name. It was a good name for a place that felt like a basement but wasn’t. It was the sort of bar I would have avoided back in Nova Scotia.
Angel and I took a place at a table along the back wall. I wondered why bars like this were compelled to line their walls with rusted bits of trash and kitsch. Why did they want this refuse to speak of the kind of place this was and what was kept in it?
The waitress was pretty and young and all wrong in this place. She was poli
te enough and brought us two pints that Angel ordered. It was the type of bad draft beer that tastes too sweet and then leaves its sour fingerprints in your mouth for hours afterwards. I drank it fast so I wouldn’t taste it. I didn’t see Jason anywhere.
“Maybe he didn’t believe me that you would come,” Angel said quietly.
“Maybe,” I said, “he just didn’t give a shit.”
Angel turned her chair so she could see the door, and she watched it like a dog with its eye on a bone. I was grateful she didn’t want to attempt some sham of a conversation, but it made me nervous to watch her in profile, staring steadily ahead and hardly blinking.
The waitress came and asked me what I wanted. I looked down and saw my glass was empty. “Another,” I said. “Something in a bottle.”
He hadn’t left a phone number for me. I didn’t know where he was staying, if he was even still in Toronto. He’d only been gone a few weeks. Was it stupid to leave, when the only way we could reach each other would be for him to find me in that house? He knew where I was if I stayed there. If he doubted. If he hesitated.
“We’re like an old married couple,” he used to say if I was naked in front of him unceremoniously. Cutting my toenails into the trash or dressing in a hurry in the morning. “We are an old married couple,” I’d said to him. Again and again, he said that, I said that. I’d thought there’d be things like that we’d go on saying all our lives.
It could have become the kind of thing we’d look back on later, together. Not an ending, but a strange time that we got through, together. Maybe he was at my door the day after I left. Maybe he was at a bar somewhere right now, thinking of me, growing tipsy and dizzy with thinking of me.
“I’m going to find Minnie,” Angel said, getting out of her chair so fast I gasped in surprise. “Maybe Minnie will know where he is.”
I nodded. She walked away, and the eyes of the dirty men with their backs against the bar took the long measure of her and the way she walked across a room and out a door.
Stephan would get halfway to one place and then turn around and go back the way he’d come. He reached decision like steel reaches flint—a snap of thought and a glint in the air and then all was certain, but fitfully so. A question or a glimpse of something in the distance and everything could be changed. I’d seen it before, how I’d say something dull or too cloying and he’d become hard and far from me, defensive and even cruel. I’d feel him leave the room from across the table. There would be no way to bring him back into it. I could only wait until he saw a woman be kind to a dog, or a warm wind pushing the curtains apart and entering the house before a storm, and something would alter in him again and he’d be mine. He had the caprice of something horribly light in the air. A falling leaf that is lost to you at the last possible moment, that is taken by a wind so slight you only know it by the sudden, surprised emptiness of your open hand. I saw him at my door. It was yesterday, it was seven o’clock last night, it was exactly right now. That moment, whenever it was, would keep all of his secrets. His back at my door, his hand on the bell, peering through the window for light inside—what he looked like, what he thought of as he stood there before my empty house. His return to me would be forever bound to that moment, in conspiracy with a regret or hesitation I would never know of. Because I hadn’t been home when he came back to me.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 6
