“Another,” I said.
A bluegrass band was playing at the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed that they’d stopped tuning up and started playing real songs, but now the hands of some nicotine-faced man were fluttering up and down the neck of his guitar, and an ancient-looking singer was baying.
A plywood door swung open beside the bar and slapped against the wall like it was hardly worth the effort to stay on its hinges. Jason walked through the door and leaned against the bar and a beer slid in front of him. He picked it up without paying and began to drink. The old men at the bar were speaking to him, but he kept his eyes on the band and his mouth shut around the neck of his beer.
There was nothing of my sister in him. By now, I supposed, my sister would have looked old like me, but I remembered her soft, pink face and corn-coloured hair. His eyes were a dark slice across a hard brown face. There was no gentleness to him. There was swing in his walk, in his weight against the bar, but it was a violent sort of swing. Like there was something in him so fretful and charged, he was full of the mysteriousness of it. Like he was the wonder of something that might soon happen. You’d watch him, close to you, like you’d watch an animal that had been raised without kindness.
So then it was a man from here who had been the father of my sister’s child. How did Mara find her way here? How funny that Mara, sightless, had made it so far, when I had hardly left the Atlantic.
I watched a girl approach Jason and get maybe half his attention for her trouble. He drank and watched the band while she looked up at him, laughing. Finally, the girl turned away, bored, and watched a piece of hair wind between her fingers. Jason looked up then and saw me.
Where was Angel and who the hell was she to have left me alone like this? She seemed sweet as pie, but I could tell there was steel in her someplace down deep. Maybe she’d planned this whole thing. To leave me here, drunk, with an empty glass and no way to go to the bar without speaking to him, and no way to leave the bar without speaking to him.
“You know you look like her,” said a man’s voice behind me.
I turned around and saw a hippie-looking fellow in a loose-brimmed green hat with shaggy grey hair around a shaggy grey face. “Mara? You know Mara?”
“I heard her sister came up here. I heard her sister didn’t even know she was passed on. That true?”
I pushed back my chair. “I don’t see how it’s at all your business.”
The man’s face lost its earthy geniality. I saw it slip off a face as hard as Jason’s. I turned my back while he was still putting his backcountry charm back together, and took my empty bottle to the bar.
“One of these,” I said. I tapped the bottle with my finger. “The ones with the horse on them.”
I grabbed the beer from the bartender’s hand and looked at Jason over the bottle as I swung it up in my fist, like I used to drink as a teenager at the harbour. After I’d got switched over to the regular high school, the only kids who hadn’t minded me hanging around were greasy-haired punks who’d dare me to dump bottle after bottle of whatever booze we could get our hands on down my throat. It made them like me, how I said yes to everything they could come up with. “You’ll do anything,” they said, and I wasn’t stupid enough even then to think it was admiration in their voices, but what it was was close enough. They thought I was fearless.
“Where’s Angel,” Jason said.
“Went looking for Minnie. Or you. I don’t know. So where’s your father?” I settled my back against the bar, beside him.
“Dead.”
The band was playing some reeling country song, and the bar folks were loving it. A crowd of girls and women were kicking their heels up and spinning each other around in time with the clinging, ringing snap of banjo strings.
“None of those girls were here two days ago,” Jason said, flat.
“This band just touring up here?” I asked him.
“No, they all the time play here. Just not usually for a bunch of tarty southern city girls.”
I looked at his hands, loose at the end of his bent arms, which rested against the bar. I looked at the way the fingers were long and thin and ever so slightly squared at the tips. I looked at my hands.
“Maybe you should go get Angel,” I said.
“She’ll find her way back,” Jason said. He took his eyes off the band and I felt the angle of his face turn toward me, though he looked down at the floor. “When’d you get here,” he said.
“Just yesterday. I didn’t know how I would find her.”
“You drive here,” he asked.
“I took the bus, and then … I got a ride with someone,” I said. The top of my head was perfectly aligned with the top of his shoulder. I was precisely the height of his shoulder.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He shifted his body and looked at me straight. “So what are you doing here.”
I told him.
I started with when we were small. Not when we were together, but after we weren’t anymore. After Aunt Una took me in to her south-end townhouse. I told him about how I was pulled out of the school she first sent me to because I couldn’t seem to learn the letters and finally someone noticed it was my eyes and not my brain that couldn’t figure out the difference between an f and a p. I told him about the school for the blind I was sent to, where we were taught to read with our fingertips. How after several years, I began to notice that I could make out larger print—street names on signs, children’s books, the titles on book covers—the words that once were smeared shadows emerging into something like clarity. Until one day the commission gave me a special typewriter and told me I’d recovered as much of my vision as I ever would and was being transferred to the regular high school, where a special reader was being assigned to read me any books that weren’t available in large type.
I told him I fell in love. And Stephan was the first thing I had ever been able to see clearly.
I finished my beer and took another from the bartender, but left it on the bar beside me, untouched. I told him how my aunt used to take me to see my father in the hospital once a year. How while I was at university I started to go more often, on my own. It would confuse things to say that I loved him, because I hated him a little, hated how even at the end of his life and the end of the beginning of mine, he was so mind-blowingly inadequate. How he was the smallest possible scrap of a family, but he was mine and I couldn’t stop myself from seeing him. He was feeble and thin and looked like a paper man—I’d look at him and think of what he’d done to me and how I could take a deep breath and fill my lungs with what he took from me and blow it out and sweep away this paper man who was not even a paper father. Who was less even than that.
Angel came in the door and leaned against the wall beside us, listening for a moment. Then her eyes met mine, and she stepped away into the crowd of people stamping their feet and clapping at the whirling, winding, whorling thing the band was playing now.
I told him the doctors had asked me not to talk to my father about when Mara and I were young. They said it would only upset and confuse him, and that he wouldn’t remember it anyway. So we never talked of another daughter, another sister. I’d tried as a child to find Mara. A teacher had helped me write to the family of a second cousin in northern Alberta who’d agreed to take in the fully blind child Aunt Una had felt incapable of caring for. But they had given Mara up after just a few months. She had been taken in by a Catholic charity home for the blind, which shocked me then but made me laugh inside my head years later by my father’s bedside, because it would have killed him years before his heart did to know the papists had a hold of his own blood. The second cousin said she was better off there and never wrote again. The older I grew, the less I thought of my sister as a person who still lived in the world. When I was mistreated at school, I’d remembered this person who once was as close as my skin, but as if she was someone irretrievably gone.
The day I went to tell my father I would be leaving Halifax and would not be abl
e to visit anymore, he asked if I was going to see Mara. He told me he had got a letter once from the cousin in Alberta. That she’d married and moved to some far-flung corner of the Yukon Territory. After I arrived in Toronto, when I phoned, he spoke more and more often and urgently about Mara. He often asked when I would visit her. Eventually I began to answer, “Soon.”
“I didn’t know until he died if it was true,” I told Jason. “At the funeral, the daughter of the cousin in Alberta came. She told me it was true, and said Mara was living in Dawson last she heard. I swear I meant from then to come. But it was so far away, and I didn’t know what kind of place this was, how you’d find someone here.
“Two weeks ago, Stephan left me. I waited for twelve days for him to come home. He didn’t.” I said, “I had nowhere to go.”
Jason was turned so far from me I could almost see his back. I looked up at his face. His eyes. He was watching the dancers.
In front of the band, the long, swing-haired girls in their loose jeans and shiny lips were tiring. They were drunker, sexier. They wanted to be taken home. The boys watched from chairs and were too tired or too sad to take them home. A couple older women laughed to themselves and danced in a clumsy way, apart. In the dark, behind the other dancers, near the door, Angel held her hands above her like a child and moved her body ever so slightly, like a steel string plucked and ringing. Her black hair had light in it.
We tipped our bottles to our mouths and watched.
Mara
FIVE
WHEN YOU HAVE A CHILD, it’s like all you are and everything that happened to you is just one story, and that is the story of how you got there, how you arrived to being the start of another person’s life. Every story I told him was essentially that one, because that was the story he wanted, and after a while, that was the only story I had to tell. So I’d tell him the story of how I left the place where I started, but somehow that story always ended before it got to the place where I finished. Somehow we never came to speak of what had happened in between, about all the mornings and nights I lay awake alone in a bed far, far from the place I’d once thought to be the world, and how as I lay there I had not one idea of how my life would end. I never told him about the doctors who made me hold still so they could press their instruments against my eyes and sigh, so that I could imagine them shaking their heads at the woman who had brought me there.
All the things that got lost in the story I told him, all that happened in between, began with her, the woman who had brought me there. If I were to tell him now what I could not then, I would start by telling him about Nellie.
Nellie was a distant cousin of my mother and would often heave sighs of her own and repeat to herself, as if reminding herself it was true, that her own mother would have wished it so. At last she told me the doctors had done all they could do for me and there was nothing left but to take me home with her. I didn’t dare to ask her the question that was as much a part of me as the bones beneath my flesh, because I feared her answer.
She took me in her car with her to a hotel that she told me was near the airport, so we could get an early start. She took my hand to the surface of the bed so I could find my way along the mattress to take the other side beside her. I lay awake and listened to the sound of her turning pages beside me and knew the answer to the question I hadn’t asked and that it would be only us two who’d take a plane into the sky tomorrow.
Minnie
late June 1996
SIX
I KNEW THE SECOND I saw her what I was looking at. There’s trouble in pants, I thought to myself, and I went right up to it like someone who didn’t know that the things that ruin people’s lives can show up with dyed blond hair and a suitcase. I knew better, but I couldn’t stop myself. Maybe, just for a second, I wondered what if he’d been telling the truth all this time. But I should have known better. He came out of his mother lying, and there wasn’t anybody who could show up out of nowhere and make his lies true.
And of course, after that, there wasn’t anything else to be done. I had maybe a moment when I could have pretended I didn’t see her there, and maybe that would have been that. I looked hard at her the first time I saw her, when I was still trying to figure out what I was looking at, and I saw all of her. She was sharp and soft at the same time, bony hands and knees and elbows on arms and legs that looked like they had no muscle to them at all. Her face would have been good-looking once, like Mara’s, but it was more worn out than Mara’s ever got, with worried lines back and forth on her forehead and around her pale, watchful eyes. If I said this, nobody would know what I meant, because his were dark and much narrower, but they were Jason’s eyes in her head. Her mouth was the only thing I liked about her. Her mouth looked like it could laugh good and hard, or tell a dirty joke. But I would have rathered I never heard one word come out of that mouth. And maybe if I’d just left her standing there by the river, looking like she’d been dropped there from the moon and didn’t have the sense God put in a peanut, maybe then she’d have gone back wherever it was she came from. But there’s no sense to that, to even wondering about that, because it isn’t what happened, and after I’d let her say who she was, it was over for Jason and I knew I just had to wait for him to figure out what I’d known from the first second I saw her.
She didn’t leave. She was moved into that hotel and had started calling it home. And I didn’t buy it, because she came here from somewhere and that was where she’d go back to, sooner or later, and home was the place you were headed, not where you’d holed up for a while. But Jason did. “I’ve got to go home,” she’d say at the end of a night and peel herself out of her chair, and I’d see his eyes shining when she said the word, because to him, I knew, she was saying, “I’m here.” Or “I’ll stay.” Or something like that.
At first, she’d just sit at the bar beside him, mouthing the neck of a beer, and some nights hardly a word would pass between them. Or she’d listen while he talked to someone else. Or she wouldn’t listen, just sit there glassy-eyed and looking like her mind had gone back to where she’d come from and left the rest of her there in the chair. It took nearly two weeks before she started to ask questions.
That night, he had his back turned against her, though he wasn’t talking to anybody else. I was watching the two of them, because I had it in my mind to keep an eye on her and because I could feel the stare of Glenn Stuckey on my back like it was his hot, stinking breath on me. I’d heard Glenn called a mean drunk, but he wasn’t any nicer sober. “That kid should be with his father,” he’d hissed at me when I sat down. “Some mother you are. Out at the bar till all hours with a kid at home. I pity that boy.” He had the palest eyes I’d ever seen, and back when we were in school a lot of girls were taken with those eyes. There were a lot of kids without fathers in this town, and people figured at least a few of them were his. But it was the only mercy I’d seen him show that he never laid claim to them. So I kept my mouth shut and turned my eyes to where Aileen was twisting on her stool like she had something to say.
I thought she’d just sit quiet like she usually did and wait till he let on he knew she was there, but then out of nowhere she said, “So your father’s dead.”
He turned his face and gave a little nod but didn’t look at her.
It was like she was testing whether he’d answer the way she was expecting. “Before Mara?”
“No.”
She was braced like she thought he might hit her. “How?” she asked.
“Well,” Jason said slowly, getting more interested, “for weeks, hunters had been returning from the woods, saying there was a grizzly out there bigger than any they’d ever seen before. Some said it wasn’t even a grizzly but some new creature, like a grizzly had come across something else, one dark day in the woods, and the two animals had lain together and created this new beast. My father didn’t believe the stories, and so one day—”
I lost patience listening to this. “Just a wreck,” I told her, and she looked up
in surprise, startled to see me there, two seats down the bar from Jason. I looked right back until she lowered her gaze. “He wrecked his truck. It was bad weather and he lost control of his truck. It happens,” I said, and I looked at Jason. “And that’s all that happened.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to Jason after looking back and forth between us for a moment, and then she watched as he lit another cigarette and put it down beside the one already burning in the ashtray. She reminded me of someone. If I ignored her eyes. If I looked only at her mouth.
“I’ve been drinking too much,” she said to Jason, more quietly, but I could hear her fine.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 7
