There’s another pause – a long one. “Do you want to mark it with a cross – the way they would have originally marked it right after they buried her?” I venture.
It’s a difficult question. You squint, furrowing your forehead, shifting your mouth to one side of your face. The truth is we’d no sooner use a cross to refer to anything heavenly than we’d use a Nazi machine gun shell to commemorate our great-uncles who were killed in the war.
It’s what you’re thinking right now as you say, “Caroline didn’t die on a cross.” Your face softens and you look up at the flat, white sky again. “She died – all torn up in love for this baby and his father.”
I let my hand fall, cupping your shoulder.
You drop to kneel on Lost Caroline’s grave even though the downward force of your weight wrings water out of the mossy earth. It soaks through your clothes, all the way to the skin on your shins and kneecaps. You’re laying down the lengths of broken birch wood – piece by piece.
I squat beside you. “What are we making?” At first, you don’t answer, but you don’t stop laying the wood down either. It’s starting to form into a shape like a tight curve. “Are you making her initial: a letter C?”
“No, Brigs. We are marking this grave,” you tell me, “with a wedding ring.”
We get back to the house of the Auntie we’re staying with – a photo of Lost Caroline’s headstone stored in the memory of my cell phone. Our plane leaves from the Fredericton International Airport in a few hours, so it’s time to dry our feet and get ready to leave. The trip from here to the airport should only take a little over an hour but everyone else in the house is getting fussy and acting like it’s a long way. I guess one hour’s traffic is a lot, here in a tiny Maritime county.
I’m zipping my black suit into a garment bag when I catch you sitting on the edge of the bed, stalled, with a sock dangling from each of your hands.
“Auntie sure keeps it warm in here,” you say when you see me looking at you.
I frown and cover your forehead with the palm of my hand. Your skin is dry and hot. “You’re sick.”
You clamp your hand over mine. “No.”
“Don’t tell me you swallowed your teaberry leaves.”
You almost smile. “No. That’s not it.”
“Then you must be coming down with a virus or something.”
“But I can’t be sick. What if someone at the airport notices I’ve got a fever and they won’t let me on the plane?”
I don’t even shrug. “They’ll let you on the plane.”
You’re pulling your socks on quickly now, as if hurrying will help. “But they have all those pandemics going around these days. What if someone decides I’ve got SARS or bird flu or something?”
I laugh. “SARS? That was ages ago.”
“So? We need to get back to the kids tonight. Aunt Marla’s been too generous already. We need to get the boys out of her house.” You look around the room from where you’re still slumped on the edge of the bed. “I need to find some medicine to take before we try to board the plane.”
I go to the house’s single bathroom and bring back one tablet of the only fever reducing drug Auntie has in her medicine cabinet. She told me they’re left over from the hernia surgery she had last year, and we’re welcome to take them all. I won’t tell you that. The pills are those acetaminophen tablets with codeine added to them. I shake one out of the bottle and close the rest of them back inside the cabinet. Medication like this always knocks me right out. But as soon as you see me coming through the bedroom door with the lone tablet in the palm of my hand you’re sending me back for more.
“Are you trying to insult me or something? Brigs, you know my liver has super powers. I need more than one pill.”
I come back, squinting at the writing curving along the surface of the pill bottle. “Look, it says here not to exceed – ”
You stand up – fast, like you’re much more angry than you are sick. “Well, my family’s past generations of super-metabolizing alcoholics say otherwise – ”
“You’re invoking all those coughing, dead alcoholics – now?”
“Yes.”
I stand back, holding the plastic pill bottle over my head, well out of your reach. “Lamarck was wrong, you know,” I argue. “You can’t inherit the drug tolerance your ancestors acquired over lifetimes of hard drinking – especially when you’ve never even tasted alcohol yourself.”
You’re clawing at my sleeve, trying to climb up my arm, toward the bottle. “Of course I know that, Brigs. I never claimed I had my ancestors’ drug tolerance.” You make a weak little jump for my hand. “What I did inherit is their super-liver – the liver so awesome they had to drink enough to bring on an addiction before they could even feel a buzz.”
“But don’t you have a grandmother who has an allergic reaction to heavy meds?”
You jump a little higher this time. “That is the other side of the family. The one I don’t take after.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do so.”
I still won’t lower my arm.
“Come on, it’s not like Auntie’s pills are hard drugs or anything,” you say. “If you want, I’ll promise to go right into rehab without any complaining as soon as we land back home. Please...”
Knowing I can’t keep the pills from you forever, I give in. You swallow the first tablet without any water so I go get you a glass and stand watching as you down the second dose. I wonder if they’ll let us onto the plane if I arrive at the gate carrying you over my shoulder like deadweight.
The drugs are powerful enough to get your fever down. And even though your eyes are disappearing into the dark circles beneath your brows, you still sit beside me in the rented car crowing, “I told you. Do I seem stoned to you? Do I?” You press your hands against the bottom edge of your ribcage, the space where your liver must be. “Super powers!”
By the time we both walk onto the plane you’ve stopped proclaiming your super powers but you still haven’t fallen to sleep. We take our seats over the wing and I can’t tell if it’s the drugs, or exhaustion, or just affection that prompts you to let your head droop against the side of my arm. Through the fabric of my shirt, I can feel your skin starting to burn again. You stay that way until there’s no ocean outside my airplane window anymore – there are hardly even any lakes. There are just brown and green squares, rectangles, and other perfect polygons – the working fields cultivated all over the prairies. No one has to tell me we’re almost home.
“I wish you said my name more often,” you murmur with super-heated breath against my arm.
“Your name?”
“Yeah. It would be nice to hear my name more – my real name, I mean. The one my parents gave me, not the one the kids gave me.”
I turn my head and press my closed mouth into the heat of your crown. “You need to sleep.” When I inhale, your hair smells like that enormous bottle of wheat germ and honey shampoo from your Auntie’s bathroom. On you, it’s sweet.
You’re scorching more speech against my arm. “I just had a weird little half-awake dream. You weren’t in it though. I was by myself and I was rising out of this dark space, breaking through tangled up tree roots with my body, all laid out flat. And there was something closed between my arms but they were so stiff I couldn’t tell what it was. And then there was this rush of really pungent – something – like black forest loam sifting over my face. And when I broke through I knew it was, like, pine needles and the lobes of spruce cones and dry, empty insect shells. I was coming up out of the earth and someone was calling me. Someone was calling me – Caroline.”
Thirteen
Your cousin Janae’s wedding was one of those lavish pink fantasy weddings, the kind mothers insist on for daughters who get married right out of high school just in case the brides never accomplish anyth
ing else worth a big party during the rest of their lives. You’re well out of high school but still single when Janae marries that guy even though he’s so much older than her. Word in the family is that you’ve read something in one of your university textbooks about destructive power imbalances between spouses with wide gaps between their ages. But the family agrees all that intellectual mumbo-jumbo of yours is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that you’re lovelorn, at age twenty.
Janae punishes you for their talk by not inviting you to stand beside her at the wedding reception wearing a pale pink satin dress that will look like it’s made of tin foil in all the flash photography. So here you are, playing the Cinderella of the wedding. You’re too estranged from the bride to be an overdressed member of the wedding party with a free manicure and a new pair of shoes. But you’re still close enough to her to work until after midnight tacking pink streamers to the walls of the church hall.
When the glass bowls of pink lemonade punch are full and the trays of after-dinner sweets are piled high enough, you drift away from the wedding reception and onto the burgundy sofa in the foyer outside the hall. This foyer is where we meet.
The first time I see you, the front of your plain black dress is wet across the middle from the time you’ve spent leaning against the sink, washing the dishes from Janae’s “head table” – the only table not set with paper plates. Your black shoes are just like the ones china dolls wear right out of their boxes – round-toed, flat-heeled, with one strap slung across the top of the foot and buckled on the other side.
“Just call them ‘Mary Janes,’” you’ll tell me much later, when I’m your husband and I miss those shoes and I’m trying to tell you how much I liked them.
At Janae’s wedding reception, your Mary Janes lay about a metre apart on the floor of the church foyer. You kicked them off without undoing the buckles before you sat down and pulled your sore feet up underneath yourself. That friend of yours is with you – the girl you share an apartment with during university. Right now, she’s better than a sister to you.
“Look at how wet you got in there. You should have let me wash and you could have dried for a while,” she chides you.
You just shrug. “Then we’d both be soggy. And there’s no point in that.”
Your friend is a wholesome, kind, and pretty girl. You’re right to love her the way you do. And even though it’s almost more embarrassing than I can stand, your nice roommate is the reason I’ve come here tonight.
Janae doesn’t know me yet. Neither does her new husband. I haven’t been formally invited to the wedding reception at all. But here I am anyway, in the foyer with the pretty girl and her shoeless friend – the friend wearing a wet dress and argyle knee socks that don’t quite stay up. I am the awkward guest-of-a-guest. I’ve come with my cousin. He’s a friend of the groom’s and he couldn’t be more sure that your pretty roommate is the perfect girl for me – perfect enough, anyways.
She is good-looking, just like my cousin promised me. She’s got huge dark eyes like a big game animal – a pretty animal, don’t get me wrong. Maybe this is where you got the idea I prefer brunettes. Even though you always laugh through the words, I still hate it when you pull that old line on me. I thought you got an A in that demography seminar you took. Didn’t you? If you did, then you should know that most of the people in the world have dark hair so it stands to reason that most of the girls I dated before you would have had dark hair too. No matter how many times I explain it, you keep teasing me about having a “thing” for brunettes.
I’ve been sticking to the fringes of Janae’s wedding reception all evening – still a little sheepish about being here. I walk the circular corridor around the chapel and the main hall, fingering the pink ribbon tied in ringlets around a tiny piece of gift-wrapped fruitcake someone handed to me from a big white basket. It smells spicy but sad – like the week after Christmas, and the disappointment that comes with knowing the good sweets have all been eaten and there won’t be any more.
When I see you and your roommate on the burgundy sofa, I have to force myself to sit down. I’m peering around you, looking past you, to the pretty animal on the opposite end. After spending the past two years of my life in the rural Philippines, I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to say to girls like the two of you.
It’s okay. You’re starting to talk to me first, waving at the piece of fruitcake in my hand. “You’re not going to eat that.” It isn’t a question.
“Why not? I mean, it looks fancy – kinda like it’s not really meant for eating. But still….” The words are coming easily. I’m trying not to look surprised at the sound of my own voice.
“Oh, it’s edible, alright,” you say. “Don’t let the ribbon curls scare you.”
I smirk. “Yeah, and they must have gone to a lot of trouble to find this ribbon – and all the rest of these decorations in this same, washed-out pink colour.”
I don’t know it was you who dragged a scissor blade along every shred of this pink ribbon to make all these long curls. Janae set the basket of wrapped cakes in front of you last night, calling it “groom’s cake” and promising that if you slept with a piece of it under your pillow on the night of the wedding, you’d dream of the man you were going to marry. I don’t know any of it.
You’re shaking your head. “You’d better not call it pink. It is not pink. It’s ‘blush.’”
I can hear something dark in your laugh. “Blush,” I repeat. And I’m still a fool so I ask, “How did you guys wind up stuck here doing dishes tonight?”
Your pretty roommate finally speaks. “I came with her.” She’s poking you with her elbow.
“And I came with my cousin,” you add. “She’s the bride.”
I sit on the church sofa choking apologies for trash-talking the wedding decorations to the bride’s cousin. But you act like this kind of mistake is exactly what you want from me. You laugh, loudly, and reach out to drop a small hand very lightly and briefly on my knee as you excuse me. The touch waves through my gut and I hold my jaw clamped shut, looking down to where your woman’s hand left its trace on the neurons in my knee. But it’s not personal. It’s not you – not yet.
I don’t know how to make normal conversation anymore so I try to teach you how to count to five in one of the rural Filipino dialects I learned while I was away.
“Usa, duha, tulo, upat, lima.” I pronounce the numbers carefully. And I smile when I hear you repeating them with the French-Canadian accent you generalize to all non-English languages.
“Now you try it,” I tell the pretty roommate. But she just waves her hands and laughs as if it’s all impossible.
One of your brothers sticks his large fair head out of a doorway and waves you back into the hall. “Aunt Tammy won’t let Janae throw her bouquet until you come back in,” he says.
Somewhere in the divorce from Uncle Ned, Aunt Tammy decided to keep you. And now, the two of you have come here tonight with an agreement that you will stand beside her at the back of the mob of single, female wedding guests and keep the bridal bouquet from touching her in any way. Unlike Uncle Ned, Aunt Tammy is not a romantic. Even before all the trouble started between them, whenever she was asked what it was that brought her together with her husband she’d always just say, “Alphabetical order. Our gym teacher made us line up on the first row of the bleachers in the alphabetical order of our last names – and his came right after mine, obviously. That was it, kids. That was the magic.”
After the wedding, back in the city where we go to university, I visit your apartment at least twice a week, sitting on the carpet, playing that nursing home card game the pretty roommate likes so well. You and I aren’t alone together until that time I meet you unexpectedly roaming between the buildings on campus. You’re laughing at me again when you find me standing in an alpine currant hedge outside the Student Union Building, eating the fruit right off the twigs.<
br />
“I thought those little red berries were poisonous,” you say, plucking one yourself and frowning as you hold it up to your nose.
“That’s the best thing about them,” I explain. “Everyone thinks they’re poisonous. That’s why they’re all still hanging here, uneaten and ripe and right in the open, left for people like us.” I don’t know why I say “us” – just some kind of cosmic slip, a stumble over the timeline, I guess.
I finally convince you to eat the currant you’ve picked, but there’s nothing I can say to get you to try the fruit from the chokecherry tree limbs over our heads.
“Dude, that’s ornamental fruit.”
“Says who? It’s perfectly good for food.”
You laugh at me. “No, it isn’t. I’ve eaten chokecherries before. It was a prank my brothers played on me. You can’t tell me they don’t taste like wet alum packed around a pit.”
I scoff and toss a tiny, black cherry into my mouth.
“No way.” You shake your head as I spit the pit into the bark mulch spread beneath the tree. “If you can eat ornamental chokecherries like that, either you’ve got extremely sophisticated taste or no sense of taste at all.”
But you still walk away from the university with me that day. You climb the stairs to the scruffy, walk-up apartment I share with my matchmaker cousin and you look through every page of the photo album from my days in the Philippines.
“The dialects in the Philippines aren’t even that hard to pick up. I learned to speak three of them while I was there.” I’m just about bragging. “Here, I’ll teach you to count to…”
“Usa, duho, tuha…” you interrupt in your French-Canadian accent.
It’s a terrible moment. “I’m repeating myself...”
“Maybe a little. But it’s okay. Anyway, it’s all very interesting.”
“Maybe the first time around.” I roll my head and close the album. “Sorry.”
Love Letters of the Angels of Death Page 11
