In the Land of Birdfishes

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  Just before I told him the thing I knew, as we walked home together, I remembered how the first time it had happened, he had stopped suddenly, when we had just begun, and he went fumbling in his pants for one, and I said, “Don’t,” and he said, “You don’t want me to?” and then he looked like he understood and said, “Oh, you’re on the …”

  But I wasn’t, and it was Mara I thought of then. And on the way home, as I stopped him, and put my hand against his shoulder, I remembered how that night he’d wanted to use one and it was Mara who had made me think maybe something like a miracle might happen. And the funny thing was, it wasn’t that night I was really thinking of even then. It was Mara herself, and how she had not been able to see anything at all.

  Mara

  SEVENTEEN

  MARLA’S SISTER WAS FURIOUS with me for having left the bar, but Marla told me she wouldn’t even have noticed except that the other girls had got worried. On the way back, Marla’s sister said we weren’t to breathe a word to anyone at school about me leaving the bar with that old Indian. The other girls and I were all astonished to learn that it had been an old Indian I had gone off with, and one of them asked me in a whisper what it was like, and I said I didn’t know what to compare it to.

  I didn’t think much after that about the man called Jason. After our short time in the city, it was especially thrilling to return to the old routines at school, and I found myself enjoying everything more, the tasteless food seemed saltier, the nuns kinder, and the words we read each day with our fingertips from the Bible seemed to speak to me directly.

  It was Agnes who noticed. One day, I was struggling to fasten the zipper that ran up the back of the heavy wool tunic we all wore, and she heard and came and tried to help me. “It won’t go, Mara,” she said at last. “You’ll have to tell them.”

  “Tell them what?” I asked. My breasts had grown larger lately, and I was ashamed of having eaten so much that my belly pushed open the pleats in my tunic.

  Agnes linked her finger around mine. “I’ve heard you in the bathroom. I’ve heard you be ill, I mean.”

  I felt my face heat. “That’s private,” I told her. I had only gone when I thought no one was there. Lately the hymns in chapel had made me feel dizzy and faint, and I’d sometimes had to hurry away to the toilet, though we weren’t supposed to leave chapel till after the last prayer. Sometimes the nuns reading to us made me queasy too, as if their voices and the priest’s too had all entered into my head, pushing their words inside me, more and more, deeper into my belly, which was already too full with their words.

  “You don’t know?” Agnes asked. “Do you not know?”

  I squeezed her finger, knowing I hurt her a little. “Of course I know,” I said.

  She didn’t believe me. “Mara, when is the last time it came?”

  It took me a moment to understand her. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do they hurt? Your tits, I mean?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  She leaned closer and said in my ear, as if she were sharing a secret, “My sister said her bosoms always hurt and it didn’t come anymore. And I would always hear her sick in the bathroom, like you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked her, becoming frightened. “Is something wrong with me? Am I sick?”

  “Mara,” Agnes whispered, her voice delighted with the secret and the thrill of it all, her voice happy for me. “You’re going to have a baby.”

  I didn’t understand at first what she was saying to me. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Mara.” She squeezed my finger tighter, and then her hot, moist hand took all of mine in it. “I’ve tried to figure it out. Was it when you went to town? Or was it … one of the priests?”

  I put both hands on my belly and wondered if it could be true, what she said. I wondered if I might be able to do something like that, make a person out of nothing, inside me. I didn’t see how I could. I had never done anything but try to be nothing, nothing bad, nothing wrong, nothing loud, nothing in the way of other people. Sometimes in my own prayers I thanked God for making me blind so that I couldn’t see how every day I got a little smaller. I was so tiny now, it was no wonder that the people I once loved had lost me. No one came looking for me because no one looks for nobody. I was a mistake in space, and that was all. A body where the hole of her should have been. And that was why God and my mother took my eyes. To make me disappear.

  But if it were true. If I could make out of nothing another person, it might not be so very different than having a hand reach out across the dark and take yours, as if you were one soul housed in two bodies. My body might be a house for another, and then, if that were true, it might be like what the whole world looked like if you had two eyes to see it.

  “Mara?” Agnes asked. “Mara, why are you crying?”

  Jason

  late August 1996

  EIGHTEEN

  SHE WAS DOWN ON THE BED, on her stomach, with her arms bent at the elbow and her hands up in her hair, over her head. Her face was turned sideways, away from me.

  The night before, she’d told me, and I broke everything in the house. Not when she’d told me she was pregnant with my baby, but afterwards, when she told me she was going with that old man of hers to Vancouver to raise it like it was his. My baby. Inside her, I thought in wonder, and looked at her, the black of her hair in piles on the dirty sheets of the bed. My child and hers.

  The house was carpeted with the glittering bits of glass, smashed plates and broken frames. There was nothing left but walls and floors and furniture that was too large to be crushed or thrown. Angel had watched me calmly as I began to break the things that hung on the walls or sat on the shelves. When I began opening cupboards and drawers, she went outside and stood on the grass with her hands on her waist, her back to me. It took hours to finish breaking everything, and then I had to check to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, left something buried, whole and intact. Aileen came downstairs and I heard her and Angel talking, in soft voices, and then Aileen got a bag from her room and left the house.

  When I was quite sure I’d got it all, I sat down on the kitchen table (the chairs were legless, backless, on the floor) and Angel came and leaned beside me. “I can stay here tonight,” she said, “if you want.” I couldn’t speak, but I nodded my head and she led me by the hand up the stairs. She gathered the four corners of my blanket, littered with the waste of things I’d once owned, and lifted it off the bed and then fell asleep. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at her for a long time, and then I went back downstairs, crushing broken things into smaller pieces with my heels on each step as I passed. I didn’t sleep.

  As I cooked breakfast, in the morning, I could hear the bed creak upstairs, but when I brought it to her, in the pan, she was still buried in the blankets, her face turned away from me. I shook her shoulder, and she turned her wide-open eyes to me. She took the pan and asked if I wanted some, and I didn’t answer. The eggs were hard in the middle like she liked them, and she cut them into pieces and then cut the sausages and tomato slices up too and mixed it all together. I watched her eat.

  I thought of calm things. I pictured a piece of wood, long and perfectly smooth. I pictured a hand sanding it even smoother.

  “Does he know?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said the girl on the bed.

  I took the empty, greasy pan away and laid it in the kitchen sink. When I came back upstairs, she was lying like this with her back to me.

  “Let me touch it,” I asked. I reached my hand toward her stomach, I knelt by the bed. Outside, the grass was August-bleached, straw-coloured like it would be when the snow melted back the next spring.

  “No,” she said. “Not now.”

  “Are you angry with me?” I asked.

  There was silence, and then, “No.”

  “Did I scare you last night?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and she turned to me then. “I wasn’t scared.”


  I’d never seen a better-looking girl. She was like a model. She looked like a magazine page. Her features as perfect as an animal’s, her little fox teeth. Those deer eyes. I knew it was wrong, with all this, but I wanted to fuck her, right then. I didn’t even know if you could fuck pregnant girls, but I wanted to have her by those skinny hips, to be in the bed with her there on the dirty sheets, with everything broken around us.

  “I keep thinking about your parents,” she said. She sat up and stared out the window. I knew without looking everything that was out there.

  “They were so happy,” I said, fast.

  She looked at me. I couldn’t read her face. “Jason,” she said.

  I talked fast so she couldn’t interrupt me. “No, they were so in love. I didn’t know it till I was old enough to understand, but that was what love looked like. They fought, you know that, but they loved each other. You could always tell the kind of love they had. It was like it made them mad, loving each other like that, it drove them to strange things, crazy things, hurting each other sometimes. And it’s so hard to tell the difference. When I was a kid, sometimes I’d think they were fighting, but they were, you know, kissing or doing other stuff, all close, and it was a different kind of love, sort of fierce in a way, so I’d get mixed up because I was a kid and didn’t know about sex or anything, and it would almost look like a fight they were having, when they were in love, just kissing maybe, or him wanting her, or something like that.”

  She said, “What do you think it was like for her? Coming so far, coming here. She said she couldn’t ever seem to get warm. You think it feels colder if you can’t see?”

  “She loved it here,” I said. “Remember how she was always going for long walks all the time? In the snow, or by the river in the summer …”

  Angel shook her head. “I don’t think I remember that. I wonder if she missed her home.”

  “It was such a long time ago,” I said. “She probably hardly remembered it. She was glad to come away.”

  “People always want to do that,” Angel said. “Leave places.”

  “They do,” I said, “they do.”

  She made her hair in a braid, without even looking at it, and lowered her feet to the ground. I worried about her bare feet on the floor, where everything was broken. She was humming something.

  “What are you singing?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I never wanted to go anywhere but here,” she said. “I always loved it here.”

  “Then stay,” I said. The pain felt as if my ribs were pulling apart, a hinge opening. “You can stay with me, Angie. You can stay right here.”

  “I’m going with him.” Her voice was soft and I was in love with her.

  A few hours later, she left. She said she had to go home or her mother would worry, and she didn’t want her mother looking any too close at her. She said June already suspected.

  I stood where she had left me in the hall and listened to the front door close behind her downstairs. For a long time I stared down the hall at the door to the room where Aileen hadn’t stayed. I had the feeling someone was inside and listened but heard nothing. A bug bounced around inside the glass lamp that was mounted on the wall, even though it was bright as day out, even though the lamp hadn’t been switched on in months. I didn’t know if it was a fly or a moth, but I could hear it light and flap against the glass. I took off my shoe and smashed the lamp. Even then, the door at the end of the hall stayed closed, and whoever was inside was silent.

  Then I heard the front door open again, and I knew she had changed her mind. I ran downstairs, where Aileen stood pulling off her shoes.

  “Where have you been?” I said. “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “Jason,” she said. “Jason, Angel told me.”

  “You answer me. Where did you sleep?”

  “I got a room at the Downtown Hotel. I thought I should give you—”

  “Are you calling him?” Surprise on her face and then defiance. She would have said, “Who?” I saw her mouth forming the word, a lie on her lips. I wouldn’t let her. I said again and louder, “Are you calling him?”

  She stared at me, the lie taken from her. “Why does it matter if I am?”

  “Both of you. Both of you.”

  She grabbed me, her hand on my neck so I couldn’t turn my face away. She never would have touched me like that before. I let her get brave like that. My fault. “What, Jason?”

  I could look straight at her if it was what she wanted. I could let my eyes tell her what my mouth said. It was her choice to stuff my face in it, like a dog in his shit, to leave me with no chance. “Whores. Both of you.”

  She dropped her hand and her eyes stopped looking at me and got real focused on something far away. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “I don’t give a shit where you go.”

  “You know, Jason, you ought to figure out what it is you want and how to ask for it. You want to be with Angel now? What has this changed? And you don’t want me to call my husband—why, so I have no one else and nowhere to go but here, so I can just hang around you all the time, like a hungry dog, or like I’m your m—” She went pale. “I’m going upstairs.”

  She climbed the stairs, and I heard her moving around in my mother’s room. I heard how she was a ghost in this house. I heard how not even the walls could get rid of her.

  She hadn’t even noticed that everything was broken.

  “Did you break the mirrors?” Minnie asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And the light bulbs?”

  “Yes,” I said. It would be weeks before I’d miss them.

  “And the windows?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t break the windows.”

  Minnie thought about that.

  “Well, not all the windows,” I said. When I got home, I’d break them. I hadn’t thought of it.

  Minnie reached for the pitcher and refilled my glass. The waitress had brought her a glass, but it was untouched.

  “How come you never drink, Minnie?” I asked. I felt glad to be here with her, where there was no way to know if Angel had come back.

  She shrugged. “It wouldn’t help things,” she said.

  She said it serious, but it made me laugh a little. “You don’t think so?”

  “I know so,” she said, still serious, and then she grinned. “And then who would look after you?”

  The way Minnie listened to me and the things she said made me know she understood so well that sometimes it felt like I didn’t even need to talk. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure what I’d said out loud and what I hadn’t, she was just there nodding, getting everything I said and didn’t.

  “So what,” Minnie asked, “you want a kid? You think so?”

  I thought there was something hungry then about the way she asked that. I thought about how I’d never seen her with any guys since she left her husband, not ever. “I don’t know,” I said. I thought about asking her about her kid, and if she’d wanted him. And if she still did. Some mothers brought their kids with them everywhere, even out to the bars, up till all hours. But I hardly ever saw Minnie with Amaruk.

  “She would have gone with him anyway,” Minnie said, like she was agreeing with something I’d said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  I swallowed. “But if I wanted her to stay. If I told her that.”

  “I wanted somebody like that once. Didn’t change a thing. If she goes,” Minnie said, “she’ll be happy there. It will be good for her to see that you won’t follow after.”

  “I will. I’ll go and find her. When the money comes. I’ll be a rich man and I’ll buy her and our baby a house, a huge house somewhere a million miles away. In Texas or Australia or China.”

  She shook her head. “Jason, none of us is ever getting rich.”

  “The money’s coming. You know it is. Everybody got it but us.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course it does. Why wouldn’
t we get it? What would the reason be for it to be like this for us, only us?”

  “Fuck reasons,” said Minnie.

  I put my head in my hands. “She’ll change her mind. She’ll come back.” Minnie shook her head again.

  “No,” she said.

  I didn’t think Angie would come back that night, but she did. She came home hours after me. She was a little unsteady, I thought. I was standing there, because there wasn’t anywhere to sit, not really.

  “Where’d you go,” I said. She stood at the sink, drinking water out of her hands.

  She looked at me and then looked away, wiping her hands on her pants. “This is the first cold night,” she said.

  “Did you tell him,” I said, so loud, and she didn’t even look startled.

  “He wants me to come,” she said. “He’s buying me a ticket. An airplane ticket.”

  I grabbed her then, my hands feeling so clumsy, like there were three of them or they were too big. “You don’t want to do this, do you?”

  She turned back to the sink and put some water on her face before turning the taps off, like I didn’t know she just wanted to shake me off, didn’t want me touching her. “I do,” she said. “And so does he.”

  “Sure he does,” I said, fast, “sure. He’s so damn old, it’s the only shot he’s got. He’ll be so proud to be with a girl young enough to get knocked up, he won’t care who put it in her. This is the only chance he’s got, an old man like him.”

  “He has a daughter already. Down in Vancouver. With his ex-wife. He loves her. He’ll love this one too.”

  I thought of the way a bird drops sometimes, its wings spread, over the river, and if the wind is going the right way, it can just hang like that in the air, not even moving a thing, and not go forward or backwards. Just be there, in the air.

  “You’re so slow,” I said, as I watched her untie her braid, and every smooth, shining hair that it had snared fell on her shoulders. “The way you do things, everything. You look like you’ve got more time than everybody else.”