When Jason was silent, I looked down and saw that John’s hand was in my own.
Mara
ELEVEN
FOR ALMOST THREE MONTHS, Nellie put me to bed every night, saying that everybody there was trying and it was incumbent on me to try too. I never was brave enough to ask her what incumbent meant. “We’re all sorry for what’s happened to you,” she said, “but we’ve brought you into our home and that’s Christian charity and you must learn to show your gratitude as a guest in this house.”
During the day, I tried hard to understand what she wanted from me, but failed more hopelessly with each day that passed. She wanted me out of her way, but she would heave sighs that seemed to shake the walls each time she found me gathering moss, as she called it if I sat with my hand against the glass of the window or the wood of the floor so that I could feel the cold or warmth hidden deep inside and think of how once the floor was a tree and the window was a seashore somewhere far away.
Alexander would stand silent in the doorway while Nellie braided my hair and told me what prayers to say. He would not argue when she told me the wrongs I’d done that day or instructed me to try harder the next. But he would linger when she hurried out the door, her frustration wafting behind her, and sometimes he’d touch my hair or my face and say, like I was his own daughter, that I wasn’t a bad girl. “You’ve got to learn to be careful,” he’d say before he left, if she had been especially angry that night.
But I couldn’t seem to learn where things were in the house, as I had in our own home. Too many times I found a chair where I hadn’t known there to be one, as I took a stack of plates from the table to the sink, or found Nellie’s favourite vase had been on top of the turntable where I played the Unicorn record Alexander had given me over and over. I learned to walk slowly and afraid, to hesitate to move my arms or stretch them out before me, but I couldn’t seem to learn to not try to catch myself when I fell and it was always that sudden, desperate reach of my hands that brought disaster. When I broke a glass bird that Nellie had loved, and stood there, bewildered, not even knowing where it had been or what it was that had caught me at the knees as I tried to make my way to the stairs, I heard Nellie cry that it was more than she could take and Alexander tried to quiet her, while Elizabeth whispered in my ear that it was not my fault. Later she told me she was almost certain Megan had left that stool in my path on purpose, and said she’d never known the bird to be on that low shelf where I’d knocked it as I tried to catch myself. “You must try not to make her angry,” she whispered. “And you’ll have to be more careful.” And then she taught me how many steps it was from my bedroom to the bathroom, and from the kitchen table to the stove, and from the bottom of the stairs to the door, so I wouldn’t have to bother her mother for help and make her cross. And she took me by the arm and showed me around the house where all the breakable things were, putting my hand up to touch the glasses we drank from, the smooth glass of the frames over the piano, which she told me were full of photographs of the family but mostly Megan because she was born first, and especially, the heavy bowl at the top of the sideboard that Nellie’s mother had carried on the steamer all the way from Oban. And it must have been then that something changed in me, because each plate and glass before, the bird even, had astonished me, but I was not at all surprised when some weeks later the bowl was left on the kitchen table, which had been moved a few inches from the door, enough for me to feel it strike my hip and send me grasping for a handhold and finding only the bowl, closer to the edge of the table than it ever should have been. And nor was I surprised when it was after that that Alexander came to my room and held my hand while he told me I’d be going to a special school where they’d be able to better help me with my defect. Downstairs, Nellie was still weeping, and outside the open door, I heard Megan breathing.
The next day, Nellie and Alexander took me to a school where a man I was told to call Father, though he sounded nothing like Da, told me to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then gave me the Bible to hold in my hands and asked me to read what I could. “Can you see this?” he asked me softly, and there was suddenly a greater whiteness to the world, and I asked him, “Is that light?” He squeezed my hand and told me it was.
Nellie took my arm more gently than usual when she took me back to the car, and she told me that we would have to pack up my suitcase again and bring me back after the weekend. “We’ll have a nice weekend together,” she said. “And Fa—Mr. McGivney said that we can visit every Sunday if we like. You know how busy our weekends are, but—” Her voice changed as she opened the car door and helped me into the seat. “In heaven’s name, a Catholic. But God will know I tried.”
I heard Alexander take a seat in front of me and the click of his seat belt. He didn’t say anything at all.
Aileen
late July 1996
TWELVE
I GOT USED TO DAWSON. I got so it seemed normal to sleep with the curtains pulled shut to keep the sun out. The long days stretched out and became long weeks, and every day I woke up and found I was still in Dawson.
Taking Stephan from my thoughts was a steady labour. I opened drawer after drawer in my heart, unfolded him, removed him. And what I found, as each night grew a little darker than the one before and he was all but gone from me, was that each drawer I emptied was now full with my sister. The not-being-there of her, the not-knowing of her. Her town, exhausted of her and yet gasping with her.
At first, I called our old home every night, though before I left my hotel room for the bar, I’d vow I wouldn’t. At the bar, I’d turn down the drinks I was offered, because I knew they’d only cloud my head and fill it with Stephan again. But later, on my way home, I’d pass the pay phone box and for a moment, I’d see him, somewhere far from where I stood, older than I’d ever imagined being and alone. I’d see him unlocking the door to come home to me. I’d see his suitcase in the closet again where it always had been.
A minute later I would find myself standing with the phone in my hand and that unanswered ringing in my ears that came to haunt me, that crawled into my dreams at night to find me. After a couple weeks of this, I called a lawyer in Whitehorse. “I think I want a divorce,” I said. “Can you find him for me?” And then I gave the lawyer Stephan’s sister’s address and waited.
During the day, I had nothing much to do with my time, so I would sleep late like a teenager and then wander around town, looking for something I hadn’t seen yet. I tried to stay out of the way of the locals. Maybe people knew I was Jason’s aunt, or maybe it was because the town was so full of tourists that you didn’t have to hang around long to stand out, but I’d begun getting nods when I went places and I didn’t want them. I remembered a boy at the school for the blind I went to as a child. The boy was older than the other kids on his floor, but a bit slow or something. He’d get picked on even though he was bigger than the rest of them. They’d move the furniture in his room so he’d be disoriented. Once another girl and I were invited to sneak into the boys’ dorm and listen as the older boy dropped things and tripped, trying to find his way around his bedroom. I had the best vision of anyone at the school, and I could see the shape of him clearly, moving around in a room that had suddenly become a dark, formless antagonist. He became blind, again, in that room. I watched him trip against the edge of his bed, hesitate and turn, backing up and colliding with the wall in his confusion. After some time, the boy began to shuffle around with a kind of savage mistrust of the physical world. He would get pushed on the stairs. The boys would pour water on his full dinner plate. He lost the surprised look he’d had in the dorm that time. He came to look expectant—injured and defiant at the same time. And I heard that he had begun to sleep with a staple gun in his hand. The girl who told me snickered as she said it, and I knew I was meant to find it absurd, such an inadequate weapon against a persecution that was only confirmed inevitable by his weapon choice. But instead it frightened me. I knew what it meant to him. The kind of hurt he dreamed of. Re
membering it years later, as I sometimes did, it made me depressed as hell to think about. Some people had zero chance, right from the start. And here, walking around in Dawson, passing locals who began to nod grudgingly when I went by, something in their expressions reminded me of that boy, and I had the feeling I was living among people who slept holding staple guns. I looked away from their whipped-dog faces.
Still, there was something about this strange place. Those mountains, endless, and the clouds that hung over them, the green and the dirt and the endless plains, the endlessness of the world here, the wildflowers of all colours, the aloneness of everything. And I thought maybe I was getting it. Slowly, I got how you could come to love a place like this. It wasn’t a thing I could make sense of, but more like something I felt in me, somewhere so deep it was like climbing the stairs in the dark and you think there is one more step than there is and raise your foot, let it land where there’s nothing upon which to land, and in the searing flash of a moment before your foot finds the ground again, everything in you falls; you feel what it is to have your whole body know something, to have your head and your kidneys in conversation about the importance of what is happening to you. That was what it would feel like, I thought, to love a place like this.
At the end of each day, when I couldn’t bear the heat any longer, I’d go back to the hotel and nap until the sun had dropped from the centre of the sky. And then, after dinner downstairs at the hotel, I’d show up at The Pit, as if it was a surprise every time to find Jason there. As if either of us had somewhere else to go.
“It’s growing on me,” I told him one night, shaking my head at Eloise as Jason signalled to her to bring us another round. I hadn’t finished my first drink and didn’t intend to have more than two. In this place, I’d learned, not getting drunk was a persistent, exacting task.
“What is?” he asked.
“Here,” I said. “This place.”
He shrugged and I thought he was going to turn sullen, but then a grin broke out across his face. “Dawson City?” he said.
“Sure.”
He tilted his head back and laughed, so sharp and loud the whole room took note. But the look on his face wasn’t bitter but gleeful. “Dawson City. Shit.” He took the beer Eloise slid toward him without a word. “What’s it, the scenery?”
I wondered if it was the kind of thing I could talk to him about, what it was like to look at those mountains, or that river. The way they made me feel was like the way I’d felt at home, so many years ago it would make me tired to count them, and never again till now. “Up here, it feels like you’re at the edge of something.”
He watched me. “Edge of what?”
“Maybe the world.” I swung my beer back into my mouth, reckless. “Like you might fall right off.”
He looked like he couldn’t decide if that made him mad or not. “People like you always say things like that. I’ll tell you what it feels like. Feels like the goddamn middle of everything.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“The middle is where you end up if you don’t go anywhere.
You have to do something to get away from the middle.”
“You don’t like it here?”
“What would it be to not like it here, when this is the only damn place I’ve ever been.”
“Minnie said—”
“It was like she said. I tried to go other places, but I always end up back here. In the middle.”
I thought about that. “I was in Toronto, and people there thought they were in the middle of everything.”
“Those people.” He grinned. “Those people are so far over the edge, they went right over to the other side. I think about that place, or New York, wherever, these places you hear about that think we’re just a bunch of half-naked Indians running around in the woods and don’t know what century it is till one of them shows up to tell us, and I picture them and all those big, tall buildings hanging upside down from the other side of the world. If one of them were to show me where in a book it says the world is round, I’d say, ‘Bullshit, I’d believe you if you weren’t walking around on your head.’ You don’t believe me? They show up here in their buses or their big cars like buses, RVs with fucking bowling alleys in them, and they get out of their cars like this.” He turned around and mimed like he was walking around on his hands.
I started laughing and tried to pull him back in his chair, but he went right over, launched his feet into the air and was walking on his hands for a few steps before he crashed to the ground.
“Fuck, Jason,” said Eloise, squeezing past him with her tray held high to show how hard her job was. He just lay on the floor with his eyes closed, laughing wild as an animal.
“Come on,” I said, smiling, reaching my hand down to him, “come on up, Jason.”
He let me pull him up. “I swear to God. They get out of their cars like that. Fuck knows how they drive.”
I waited till he was quiet again and then I said, “I’m glad I came up here, Jason.”
He glanced up at me and then reached for his cigarettes. I didn’t know how to say it to him or even if I should. I’d been thinking about the stories he was telling me, and I was sure now of what I’d only worried at first. I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew how she had died. And because of my own mother, I knew how hard it would be for him to put words to it, to how he hadn’t been enough to keep her in the world. What it felt like to know you weren’t enough to live for. I started again. “If I’d known she wasn’t here, that it was only you, I’d have come anyway.”
He shrugged and turned his face away, making his mouth into an O and sending smoke rings in halos over our heads. And then I started thinking about Stephan. What was it about Jason that reminded me of him? I knew it was wrong, probably, to feel there was anything alike in my love for my husband and my sister’s son, but there was something there that I couldn’t put a name to. Something wrong with him that I was dying to forgive. “I don’t have any other family,” I said. “I guess you don’t either. Stephan thought I was crazy … when we were angry at each other, he’d always tell me I was crazy … or make me feel I was, or be afraid that I might be. I never was like other people. I don’t know what it is or was. My eyes, or what happened to our mother”—I looked at him then, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes—”or our father, or the school I went to, or just something wrong with me. But I never fit with other people. I see other people laughing, talking so easily, and if I’m laughing or talking to them, I’m thinking, Can they tell that I’m not like them? What if they stop laughing first. Things like that, I’m thinking all the time. And that’s just kid stuff, right? Like everybody thinks that in high school or at some time. But I just never got so I felt like I could talk to another person without being afraid.”
“What about Stephan?”
“Stephan,” I said. I smiled. “Don’t you know what I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he was smiling too. “You sound pretty crazy to me.”
“You know what I want?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I want you to take me to the—what do you call it? Where you work.”
“The claim,” he said. “That’s what we say.”
“I want you to take me to your claim,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I told you we’ll go sometime, and we will. But what are we doing tonight?”
I knew he knew that it was Angel’s concert tonight, the second-last show of the music festival that the locals had all done their best to avoid. I knew he was counting on me knowing it. He would wait for me to say we should go, he would make it something he was talked into. Maybe he would even skip it if I didn’t insist. And for a moment I thought about it, and how we could spend the rest of the night here in this bar if I let it happen. And then I saw Angel’s face, the way on her face hurt didn’t look like surprise. It looked like a reminder. I thought of her face and how those calm, steady eyes of hers would look
out from the stage and not be surprised to see he wasn’t there.
“We should go to Angel’s show,” I said at last. And he gave a long, slow nod, as he raised his full glass, with something like relief.
Somehow we got there early, or the concert started late. We found ourselves waiting in the gallery over the back of the church where Angel was scheduled to sing, and I could feel Jason getting restless and wanting to leave, hating the commitment that waiting for something proved. He’d left a seat between us, put his feet over the back of the chair in front of him and tilted his head back, his cigarette almost falling out of his mouth.
“Well, look who it is.” A tall man with thick grey eyebrows nested over bright blue eyes climbed into the gallery, taking the stairs two at a time and trailing a short, shrewd-looking woman. The man smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back; he had the kind of face that was altered all over by smiling, deep-set laugh lines vaulting from the corners of his eyes across his cheeks, meeting with the curve of his mouth in a crooked grin. “And I know who this is.” He reached out a hand and clapped mine closed in it. “Glad to meet you, Aileen. Peter here. I’m sure Jason has told you all about me.”
I could feel the energy in Jason shifting as he settled more comfortably into his chair. “Not a word.”
“Get your feet off that chair, boy,” Peter said, his tone teasing, but to my surprise Jason listened to him. “Jason works with me at my claim up the road.”
“He’s my boss.”
“I’ve known Jason for years. Knew your sister too.”
I nodded.
“I’m very sorry for your loss. A great loss.”
“Well,” I said and didn’t know what more to say.
“I’m Pat,” said the woman behind Peter. “Married to this one long enough to know I’ll grow old waiting for him to introduce me. I was very sad to hear what happened to your sister. A sad story, that one. Some lives are burdens, aren’t they. Maybe it’s wrong for me to say, but I wondered if it wasn’t a blessing that she passed. I don’t mean because she was blind, don’t misunderstand me. But she seemed picked out for unhappiness. It’s like that for some folks, isn’t it.”
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 12
